When it comes to content marketing, how you share on social media can be every bit as important as what you share.
Just ask the team at Museum Hack!
They’ve revolutionized the way we think about going to the museum, providing audience development and team workshops, consulting, and even their own group tours tailored to everything from corporate team-building to bachelorette parties.
(Seriously.)
That’s a lot of ground to cover for their marketing team – not to mention the fact that their blog generates a TON of quality content that needs to be promoted!
In the past, it’s all added up to as much as 20 hours per week just to manage social media – and even that wasn’t always enough to cover all their bases.
“We’d focus Twitter on one area of the business, like corporate team-building tours, only to neglect our art/museum lovers,” said Julia Kennedy, who manages Museum Hack’s social media. “Our social media game needs to be highly curated and strong for our sales reps to be able to land deals.”
So in 2016, Museum Hack started managing their social media marketing using Edgar – and the switch has helped them achieve some serious results.
What’s their strategy? And what exactly is the impact?
We talked to the Museum Hack team about how they use Edgar to bring their modern museum experiences to a wider audience!
Better reach, more engagement, faster growth
First things first: what happens to your Facebook reach when you use a social media scheduling tool to manage your updates?
If you’re Museum Hack, your reach blows up:
Before they started using Edgar in late 2016, their organic reach peaked at about 35,000 – since then, it’s shot up to about 65,000, and with higher averages than ever.
How does that even happen?
Part of the answer is in this chart showing Museum Hack’s engagement on Facebook:
Fun fact: your engagement rate is one of the four biggest factors that influence your Facebook reach.
The better your engagement, the better your reach – not just for individual updates, but for your Facebook Page in general. And since Museum Hack started using Edgar, their average reactions, comments, shares, and other types of engagement have all gone up!
And how did Edgar help Museum Hack get there?
By giving them back their time.
The Museum Hack team is able to share twice as much content as it used to, but spends only half as much time per week on social media.
(And that includes all the time they spend on live activity, like responding to comments and managing their ads.)
“Scheduling is really important, not only for social media, but all the tasks we work on,” said Kennedy. “The more we can can schedule in advance, the less time the task ends up taking.”
The less time you spend on busywork like manually scheduling out all of your social updates, the more time you can spend on actually creating them – that means you can share a lot more stuff, and a lot more strategically!
(Here’s another case study where that same exact thing happened.)
With Edgar continually sharing from a never-ending queue of updates, the Museum Hack team is able to spend their time creating the super-shareable case studies, blog posts, and art memes their audience knows and loves:
MILF – Museum I'd Like to Fund ????
— Museum Hack (@MuseumHack) July 24, 2017
Sharing that content on a more consistent basis also means more people are seeing it than ever – especially because posting something just once means most of your audience will never see it at all!
That increased visibility makes it easier to find new followers and grow your audience – Museum Hack’s Facebook following is now growing 25% faster than it did before they started using Edgar.
But here’s the thing: Edgar makes social media marketing a lot easier, but Museum Hack owes their massive, ongoing successes to how they use Edgar, too.
What does a seriously effective social strategy look like?
They gave us a peek behind the curtain, so we can show you exactly how they engineer big wins – let’s take a look!
Inside Museum Hack’s social media strategy
Between consulting and workshops, private tours, and special events – all spread out over nearly half a dozen major cities across the US – this team has a lot of ground to cover in its marketing.
How do they manage it?
Museum Hack uses a divide-and-conquer approach to their social media.
For the uninitiated, Edgar allows you to categorize your social updates as you add them, then schedule which types of updates get posted at which times.
(Here’s a breakdown of how that works.)
Museum Hack has broken its status updates down into about 15 categories – one for each city where they provide tours, with others specific to either a type of audience (like a corporate one) or a type of content (like GIFs).
They’re spread out across their schedule like so (just click to enlarge):
The team even has a two-part method for quickly adding new social updates to their library: automatically generating updates promoting their latest blog posts via RSS, and spending about one hour per week writing other types of updates in batches.
(For real – one hour per week.)
They keep their content fresh by periodically auditing their library of about 500 updates, along with tweaking their schedule so that they post certain types of content at the times when they’re likeliest to succeed.
All this planning ahead makes it easier for the Museum Hack team to focus their “live” social media time on high-value interactions.
“The most surprising thing about Edgar is that it doesn’t conflict with our fast paced, unconventional, and experiential focused business,” said Kennedy. “We’re a fun company that uses art to create unique experiences. We want that to show up on our social media, too.”
Got an Edgar hack of your own?
Do you have a mind-blowing method for categorizing your content?
A scheduling strategy that keeps the updates flowin’ smoothly?
Share your own Edgar tips and tricks in the comments!
Special thanks to the team at Museum Hack for their insights. You can find them on Twitter and Facebook, or visit their site at https://museumhack.com/.
