Tailoring content
Information on tailoring content to get the most out of Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, repurposing content, and tagging and hashtags.
Each platform we use has a different audience, who respond to different styles of posting. We need to make sure we’re tailoring the content we’re creating for each platform.
Tailoring content for Twitter
Content on Twitter is consumed extremely quickly, so tweets should be short and attention grabbing. Twitter is where you’re able to get across a tone of voice the most – you can be playful, and lean in to trending jokes or memes.
Audiences are on twitter to be entertained and informed, so try and find a way to reframe what you want to say as creatively as you can.
Mammals are harder to taxidermy, because they have such thick skins. This means that the skins split over time, and this sea lion is an example of a taxidermist not predicting how much the skins would stretch. Come and see it at Leeds Discovery Centre.
Instead, we posted this below, before going on to explain the museum-y bits in a thread beneath it:
Audiences on Instagram are there for beautiful, attention-grabbing imagery, and less so for the text underneath. Instagram is the middle ground between the informal tone of Twitter, and the longer text posts you find on Facebook. If something is very visually striking, post it to your Instagram grid. Instagram stories are where you can be a little more playful, and show ‘behind-the-scenes’.
In the past, we’ve posted ‘a day in review’ content on our Instagram story, taking followers on a funny tour through our day – starting with a crème egg breakfast in the car park at Lotherton, and taking a tour around the site with funny comments that make it feel like we’re all learning about it together.
Instagram reels need to be quick and a bit more dramatic, to get people hooked. For example, a reel we posted about the wet store at Leeds Discovery Centre did very well:
…and the blooper-reel style videos that promote our podcast episodes are our most watched videos on social media:
Instagram prioritises video content above anything else. This means it’ll show your video post to more people, further up at the top of their news feeds.
On Facebook it’s a little less necessary to have a personality, but still important that the tone we take reflects our brand. Our Facebook audiences tend to be local and talk amongst themselves, so will tag each other in the comments section under posts. That’s why reminiscence posts do really well on Facebook – posting pictures of old Leeds, and asking for input on objects and exhibitions.
Repurposing content
We have lots of content being produced every day across the service, not always with social media in mind. It may be that you’re working on a plan for a school workshop, writing interpretation for an exhibition, or gathering photos for a blog. All of those things can be posted to social media without much more work than a little bit of tweaking for each platformed, outlined above.
A good place to start is by using content already written for an exhibition, and breaking it up into bite sized chunks about one object on display. You can then rewrite the object label to make it relevant for followers on each social media channel.
Tagging and hashtags
We don’t use hashtags with every post anymore, because followers on every platform have grown beyond using them to search for grouped content.
Instead, we use them only when a partnership or project requires us to eg. #Leeds2023.
We do tag other accounts in our posts however. Make sure you do this only to relevant accounts that are likely to repost or interact with you, and do so in a readable way within the body of your text – or by tagging them in the image you’ve paired with your post.
‘It’s your last week to visit Living with Machines at Leeds City Museum! Come down before Friday to see our exhibition in partnership with the British Library.
@LeedsCityMuseum @BritishLibrary @ACEtheNorth @LeedsCCnews’
Instead
‘It’s your last week to visit Living with Machines @LeedsCityMuseum! Come down before Friday to see our exhibition in partnership with @BritishLibrary.’
