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Making Your Museum’s Instagram a Digital Destination

Instagram is one of the fastest growing social media platforms. As of June 2018, there were nearly 1 billion active Instagram users, an increase from the 800 million users reported in 2017 . An even more staggering statistic: 500 million of these 1 billion Instagram users are active daily users. The astronomical number may seem incomprehensible, but think of this number in terms of museum audience. At the end of the fiscal year in May 2018, the ROM announced that they were close to 120,000 members . Now, imagine if 60,000 of these members visited the museum on a daily basis. Of course, it’s extremely unlikely that 50% of your museum members will ever visit your institution on a daily basis. A study in England found that 4.7 was the average number of times a visitor returned to the same museum within one year . This number helps contextualize a museum’s roster of temporary exhibitions, which provide enough rotating content that the average return visitor has something new to see on ...
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Environmental Scan

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Museum Instagram Accounts: a new and fruitful way to present your museum identity online. No two museum Instagram accounts are the same, and the institutional approach varies depending on the genre of your museum (e.g. most art museum Instagram accounts look very different from those of science museums), but it also depends on the type of information a museum chooses to display on their Instagram (e.g. is the Instagram just a creative way to convey altered hours of operation or is the institution trying to provoke more engagement with visitors). Although the genre of museum alters the content of a museum’s Instagram, there are ample examples of successful Instagram accounts for all genres of museums: Art Museums: Example: Art Gallery of Ontario You may be at your desk, commuting into work, in a coffee shop, or in bed. So this might not be your view right now. But take a deep breath and take in the splendour of the Rocky Mountains and the the colours of this Group o...
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Formulating a Strategy

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After looking at the variety of quality museum Instagram accounts, the potential may seem dauntingly limitless. It’s important to note, however, that every museum’s Instagram account should be a distinct representation of that institution. It’s important to see what other museum are doing to spark new ideas, but the first step in creating your institution’s Instagram account is to reflect on your institution’s mission. If an institution’s approach to Instagram begins with their own mission statement, it will be significantly easier and more productive to use the various features on the Instagram platform. For the sake of demonstrating how Instagram can be most effectively utilized by museum professionals, we will be looking at a fake museum Instagram account created for the sake of this tutorial. The Unreal Museum , like the name implies, is not a real institution, but using a fake museum as a demo will allow me to thoroughly demonstrate Instagram’s full potential as a platform for m...
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Forming an Instagram Identity

After you’ve asked the hard questions about what you want to achieve via your museum’s Instagram account, it’s time to start forming your Instagram identity! The best way to convey your identity to your audience is through posting content. Your initial posts and the accompanying captions will tell your audience who you are, where you stand, and why they should care. Think back to the ROM’s post featuring the dinosaur meme. The post may appear light-hearted, but whoever posted the dinosaur meme was also making a strategic choice to post content that was funny and relatable. Whoever posted the meme had their audience in mind, and that’s likely why the post generated over 2,700 likes on Instagram. When you’re getting ready to publish your initial Instagram posts, think back to your strategic plan and what you want to convey via Instagram. Posting funny memes won’t be appropriate for many institutions, for example a museum focused on social justice would likely convey a more sombre ton...
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Utilizing Features 1: Image Posts

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Single Images Instagram is an image-based social media platform, so it’s likely that the majority of your posts will be images… plain and simple, right? Not quite. While it’s fairly easy to upload images on Instagram, there are a variety of options to consider when you’re deciding on how to present content for viewers. Sharing a single image is the most straight-forward, common type of post on Instagram, but there are still several options when posting an image. There are visual edits that can be made, such as applying a filter or adjusting the brightness, but there are also additional layers of metadata that can be added to each image. The image below shows the options when you are posting on Instagram. Not only can you include a caption in the textbox, but you can also tag people, add a location to the post, and add alt text. Each of these add-ons strengthen your Instagram post, as you are adding metadata that will help make your content more accessible and search-able for a br...
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Utilizing Feature 2: Videos

Short Video Clips Just as you can upload images on Instagram , you can also upload videos. The videos can be as short as a second in length, or as long as one minute. When uploading a video on Instagram, you have the option to either film a short video (using either the front-facing or outward facing camera on your mobile device) or you can upload a video from your photo library. Video clips can be a great opportunity to highlight content on your Instagram, but a lot of work is involved when creating these videos, even though they are extremely short. Take the video below as an example. The Van Gogh Museum’s Instagram account includes several short videos that highlight pieces from the collection and information about the artist: Van Gogh practiced a lot when he was starting out as an artist. Discover one of his study projects and watch the video! #VanGoghCaptures #VanGoghMuseum #Amsterdam #Art #Painting #VanGogh A post shared by Van Gogh Museum (@vangoghmuseum) on Fe...
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Utilizing Features 3: Stories

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Why Stories Instagram Stories are one of the most unique options the platform has to offer. Recently, Stories are becoming an integral part of the app and a key mode of interacting with audiences on the app. Instagram Stories allow users to combine any/all of the Instagram options ( photos or videos ) in a series of posts that are available to be viewed for 24 hours. The idea is to provide your Instagram followers a glimpse at your life/your institution in the moment. People typically create Stories when they are attending an event, to showcase a day-in-the-life, or to share information in a chronological fashion. Instagram Stories have changed the way most viewers utilize the Instagram app. When you open the Instagram app, the first thing you will see, on the top bar of the app, are all of the Stories uploaded by people you follow. Stories are designed for easy-viewing. Any Instagram-viewer can click on your Instagram icon and start tapping their finger to advance through your st...
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Evaluating Instagram Engagement

This guide is intended to help your institution utilize Instagram’s various features to create an account that compels visitors to return to your page and engage with your institution. The idea behind making your account a digital destination is that engaged online visitors can be transformed into engaged museum visitors and patrons of your institution. In addition to the various features available to utilize, Instagram also allows you to easily evaluate the level and quality of visitor engagement. Visitors can engage in many ways, so I will discuss each engagement below with the correlating metric: Followers : The first step to a creating a loyal Instagram visitor, a “follow” for your account. Many institutions measure success by the number of followers they have, but it is important to remember that each follower (just like each museum visitor) is unique and important. Once someone chooses to follow your account, they will see your content on their feed and receive notificatio...
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