The Birdbath: Digital Tips & Trends, Winter/Spring 2024

Greetings from The Birdbath!

This newsletter from Bower Blue takes a look at digital tips & trends impacting the visual arts & design communities.

Not sure that was much of a winter. At least not around here at Bower Blue HQ in New York, where at least we broke our snow drought, but that was about it. Our friends and clients in California might have a different idea about how this winter has been.

But here we are, and there’s lots of social media updates and ideas we want to share with you. Bear with us, this one is heavy on TikTok, and we are particularly grateful for the insight from Aimee Dawson’s always-excellent Insta’Gratification blog on the Art Newspaper, from which we will try to weave a few threads. Let’s dive in…

We appreciate you being here — let us know what’s on your mind.

#1. TRENDING ON TIKTOK

Earlier this year, TikTok for Business dropped its What’s Next 2024 Trend Report. Top-level takeaway? Be unique and creative! Uh, thanks?

Fortunately, for the last couple of months Bower-favorite Aimee Dawson’s Insta’Gratification blog at the Art Newspaper has brought us plenty of actually useful insight to consider on TikTok. There is a huge audience for #art (five billion views) on TikTok, but perhaps more insightful is the fact that there are close to 800 billion views for #LearnOnTikTok. Educational content drives engagement.

So what should you be doing on TikTok? Insta’Gratification again rides to the rescue, bringing us all some excellent insight from social media expert Taylor Alber — the brains behind the popular @museumtiktok account: Videos will get longer (and better crafted); TikTok is a hugely popular search engine; and informed tastemakers and educators are beginning to overtake (at least in the art world) influencers.

#2. DANCING ABOUT MUSEUMS?

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, how do you TikTok in a museum? The Peabody Essex has a pretty great idea–a TikToker-in-residence. It’s a position they announced last spring, and it sounds like it was a success. It’s very similar to, and perhaps inspired by, the community workforce development program at the Pop District at Warhol, launched in 2021 (with the support of our sister agency, Blue Medium), which features a TikTok page for the museum managed by local high school students.

At Bower, we talk often with our clients about balancing what an organization wants to achieve and where they want (or need) to have a presence in order to do so, with managing their capacity and using an authentic voice. We can look to creative solutions like these to bridge that gap.

We’d be happy to talk about your goals and what might work for your organization.

#3. COUNTERPOINT

Earlier in February, the New York Times’ pop music critic Jon Caramanica published an article positing, “Have We Reached the End of TikTok’s Infinite Scroll?” (As an interesting aside, the SEO title was the more provocative [read: click-bait-y], “Is TikTok Over?”) In short, the article argued that with the advent of TikTok’s shopping platform, the tone of the platform shifted dramatically to one of more hucksterism than discovery. Does this really spell the beginning of the end for TikTok? Seems unlikely to us. It’s a fool’s errand to try to predict the life cycle of a social media platform, not to mention to assume that each successive platform’s strengths and drawbacks will mirror previous ones. We will continue to guide our clients through the important process of considering their overall digital and communications goals to craft a bespoke strategy. Ask us how.

CLIENT UPDATES!

Earlier this year, we went live with a new website for client Snyder Consultancy. We collaborated closely with our brilliant friends at U+Me Studios to conceptualize, develop, and launch the site for this new cultural consulting agency from Jill Snyder. With its unique visual language, crystal clear UX, and easy-to-manage back-end, we–and our client–are thrilled with how it turned out. Check it out below, and drop us a line if you want to talk about how we can do this for you.

Bower Blue produces digital strategy and content for galleries, museums, cultural nonprofits, and design studios. (Take a look at some of our clients.)

Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for updates, and see more of our productions and other work on Vimeo. And of course we’re always up for saying “Hello.”