Managing the social media function of a museum can take a lot of time and effort, as I mentioned in my Step by Step Twitter Guide last week, I’d recommend an editorial plan to make your life easier, but one thing I didn’t cover in that article was how to manage a social media editorial plan across more than one social network.
Lots of museums have a presence on both Facebook and Twitter, and I think that it makes sense to look at the content that your putting on to these websites in one plan, with a lot of overlaps.
Lets face it, everyone has their own favorite social network and the only person who is going to be reading what you write on both Facebook and Twitter is you. This is good news for your workload, because you don’t need to think of cool stuff to write on each social network, just come up with one plan and then implement it across these websites.
So what is a social media editorial plan?
As I explained last week, a social media editorial plan is a diary of the actions you will take on your chosen social media platforms, this will cover the different activities which make up your social media activity.
- Listening
- Conversing
- Editorial / broadcasting
You might say that you will spend five minutes three times a day listening (checking what people are writing about your organization) and for answering questions or responding to comments and then ten minutes a day creating editorial or broadcast material.
It is this editorial or broadcast material which I believe you can save a lot of time on, by using the same message on your different networks.
You may for example say that every Monday you will post a picture of an object from your collection and ask you followers/fans to guess what it is. This could be posted to both Facebook and Twitter, saving you both the time and effort of creating different content for different networks.
Adding Hootsuite in to the process
Hootsuite is a website which allows you to broadcast to both Facebook and Twitter from one screen, allowing you can write one message and send it to both networks at once.
Hootsuite also lets you schedule these ‘tweets’ in advance, so you could plan your editorial posts for the month ahead and automate this, so that you only need to think about the listening and conversing functions day to day.
Planning your social media activity doesn’t of course have to stop you from posting more spontaneous tweets, but it can act as a backbone to your work on Facebook and Twitter, making it easier to manage and giving you the time to create interesting and engaging content.
Is your museum on more then one social media platform? How do you manage the content?
Hi, Jim,
Very interesting topic, indeed! And the daily battle, as well.
Our museum entered on 2.0 networks in May last year. We have presence at 6 now (the most usual: Fb, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube, Slideshare, Delicious + we publish a blog). All media are accessible from one page http://www.bcn.cat/museupicasso/en/get-involved/online-community.html
For the first phase of uploading content and designing the different platforms we got some external support and to lead this phase and write content it was myself (mainly). Now that our presence is expanded and more interaction is generated, we are in the process of creating an editorial team:
-we are assigning the responsibility of “curating” 1 or 2 networks to specific staff members (which includes the 3 aspects you mention: listening, interacting and providing content)
-and we have editorial meetings to share and discuss our strategy, weekly (or more often if it’s needed).
What I would disagree is to the idea of “using the same message on your different networks.”
If doing so you may appear too insistent or repetitive to your users that follow you on different networks, plus I believe each platform has a specific way of expression that cannot be reproduced automatically. Sure it saves time, but it also diminishes effectiveness, I think.
Thank you
Conxa
@innova2
Here are some other options.
Cotweet (similar to hootsuite in functionality) can post to facebook, and other social networks using ping.fm http://blog.cotweet.com/2009/10/post-to-facebook-pages-linkedin-and-more/
Cotweet- is a web based twitter client: allows multiple accounts and multiple users, email notifications, scheduling of tweets, you can assign different members of your team to handle specific tweets, it threads conversations, and has bit.ly integration (i dislike the ow.ly iframe)
While i use cotweet for twitter. I still prefer “Selective Twitter” for posting to facebook from twitter. By adding the hastag #fb to any tweet, it will be synced to facebook
http://apps.facebook.com/selectivetwitter/
and there is always tweetdeck http://www.tweetdeck.com/ which last time i checked can display and post to twitter, facebook and myspace.
@seanmoney
Hootsuite sounds useful, yet currently we’re set up so that everything I add to our planetarium Facebook page gets automatically Tweeted anyway. This of course means making sure the first 100 characters or make sense on Twitter (together with the automatic link generated to Facebook).
Btw, what I’ve found REALLY useful recently is the new free, automatic Newsletter facility for Facebook pages ie. allowing fans who are not Facebook junkies to remain updated via a digest email to their inbox.
i use hootsuite, very usefull when managing several twitter/FB accounts. but hootsuite doesn’t update FB pages but only profiles (which i don’t use for the museum i work at). I’ve been looking for a solution (any app that would update FB pages, directly or via twitter) but could not find any…any idea ? thank you.
Samuel
Look at the screengrab above, it clearly shows Facebook Pages as an option, are you sure that this isn’t something you can do on Hootsuite?
Perhaps this si a recent change?
Ben
@ben : it does ! just checked and you’re absoluty right : it’s an option. hopfully it is new…or i’m a fool ;°) anyway, thank you so much for noticing. this will be very usefull to me. hootsuite is great.
You are my social media godfather! Every post is so relevant to my life! I will have to try Hootsuite. Currently my ‘edit plan’ consists of Outlook calendar reminders…
[...] to your fan page. Remember the social media editorial plan: I’ve written before about having a social media editorial plan for your activity on social networks. Ideally you want to plan out your updates in advance and [...]