The art of museum shitposting

Getting engagement on social media is like getting blood from a stone for a lot of museums. They’ve tried posting about their events, they’ve tried posting pictures of paintings and they’ve posted on #InternationalCatDay — so why is nobody liking their posts?

I used to use a Venn diagram of ‘What we want’ and ‘What audiences want’ (inherited from my former manager at the Royal Academy of Arts, Louise Cohen) to say ‘our content should be in this little overlap here’. I’ve since added a new circle: What works on the internet.

The problem with ‘what works on the internet’ is that shitposting works on the internet. Shitposting is deliberately provocative, or “good posts with bad behaviour.” Shitposting is popular because it’s imaginative, funny, provocative and relevant — it’s what the Twitter account @dril has perfected into an artform.

In my time as a consultant I’ve audited a lot of organisational social media accounts and they are by and large pitiful in driving conversions, with the exception of Facebook. We’ve known for a long time that social media is far better at spreading awareness, building a brand and reaching new audiences — a bit nebulous, all difficult to track and anathema to a cash-strapped, RoI-obsessed sector.

Some museums and cultural organisations have done a good job. I’ll toot my own trumpet with some my posts at The MERL and Royal Academy of Arts, and then there’s the Crab Museum, The National Archives, Orkney Library, though usually the majority of shitposting is left to unofficial meme accounts and individual museum workers. But what ties these examples together isn’t necessarily shitposting in the strictest sense — it’s that they’re treating their online channels and communities seriously, communicating in a style and language authentic to their organisations and authentic to how people communicate online. They’re not using social media as a mouthpiece and servant to everything else in an organisation but acknowledging that communities hold the power on social media, and to serve them we need to post about what they find interesting, to have conversations with them and have fun doing it.

In my personal experience at The MERL at least, expanding our audiences online did result in more visits, we made more money through the shop and were featured in national and international media. While that’s a specific case with a lot of its own variables, the argument is that having the confidence to fully embrace social media and diversify your online audiences you can also help the bottom line. The tension is how you do so without alienating existing audiences, and how you win the freedom to experiment with your online voice when those bottom lines aren’t yet being hit.

But there is a rub. While shitposting may appeal to a large and varied internet community, it doesn’t necessarily connect with ‘core’ audiences of cultural institutions — i.e. the people who traditionally visit. The Audience Agency’s population panel survey shows that a significant minority of audiences follow organisations on social media to hear what’s on and buy tickets — they may get around to it later via Google, the website or by phone, but our social media still needs to serve that basic marketing function.

The tension then is how to balance what works for the internet with what works for other audiences who are not as ‘online’ as others. For me that depends on three things:

• Institutional baggage. Some organisations simply cannot shitpost. As soon as the British Museum attempts a meme they’ll be drowned out by calls to return looted artefacts and the Secretary of State will be picking up the phone to get the social media manager fired. If a lot of people have an idea of what you are and what you represent from decades of visiting, they may find your drastically different online voice jarring and alienating.
• Knowing what you’re doing. Institutional baggage isn’t a complete blocker. I’m sure the state of New Jersey has skeletons in its closet but it hasn’t stopped them taking the internet by storm. A key to successful shitposting is knowing your niche and knowing which red lines not to cross — whether those are avoiding annoying key stakeholders, not treating people or collections unethically or simply posting irrelevant crap. You cannot jump straight to ‘unhinged’, you need to know what your scope is.
• Doing it well. This is the trickiest bit. It requires knowing the nuances of how people talk online, how to make your museum relevant to trends and having the creative spark to do something nobody has before. In short, it requires the combination of three skills which I’ve written about here.

An article has been doing the rounds recently debating whether the ‘unhinged social media manager’ trend is already dead. In the case of brands deliberately pretending their social media is spontaneously provocative and organic I would argue it was dead on arrival, and transparently a corporate strategy to anyone with eyes. There are also innumerous accounts who have played around with tone only for controversies in other areas of their organisation to come back and bite them in the arse (see first bullet point above).

But in my mind this was never about shitposting as an objective. It’s about treating social media with the respect it deserves and communicating what you do authentically. So long as it’s in a human voice, you know which audiences you’re trying to connect with AND you’re reflecting the needs/wants of that audience then you’re golden.

But more importantly for me as an individual it is fun. Simply being a funnel for the rest of the organisation to force their agendas through is depressing when you can see with your own eyes that it is not working. The best social media happens when you give the people in charge the time, space and support to reflect what works on the internet.

Just make sure they know what skeletons are in the closet.