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 each return visit to the institution. But there’s an enormous difference between return museum visitors and return web visitors. With an average 50% of Instagram users active on a daily basis, it’s important that museums consider content generation that can keep pace with modern day internet viewing habits.

What does it mean to operate an Instagram account that accounts for unique internet viewing patterns? Your museum’s social media identity will largely depend on your unique institution, but before you take the time for some critical self-reflection, it’s important to take an environmental scan of the museum Instagram landscape to see which institutions are bolstering engagement, and which institutions are falling short of maximizing the social media platform.