Tips for promoting art conservation on social media

​The newest issue of News in Conservation, from the International Institute for Conservation, includes tips from three of the account managers for the WUDPAC Instagram account. Excerpted from the article by Melissa King, Marie Desrochers, and Isaac Messina:

All three of us can agree on the importance of the work we do in conservation. Even though there is some bias, we can also agree that conservation is fascinating and undoubtedly has great public appeal. So why are we will struggling to explain what we do to the public? We believe that the field of art conservation could do more to promote our work through social media. As students, we have been attempting to do this at the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) through our growing Instagram account, @ud_artconservation, and we are excited to see the work of other similar accounts. We thought it would be helpful to list a few of the tips we have found useful when managing the account in hopes that it may encourage others to promote their work in this way:

​1. Instagram is a visual platform. This is your chance to use your photography skills to create beautiful images and quickly catch a viewer's eye. Think of your account as a whole and not just as a series of individual posts. Many will open the account page, glance at the top few photos, and either decide they want to follow the account or move on. The images should be striking, diverse, and work cohesively.

2. Try not to post more than 2-3 times a day, and each post should be at least 3 hours apart. Think about the times people are most likely going to look at their phones, such as around lunchtime or when the workday begins winding down. When making decisions about when to post, you may even want to consider the time zone of the majority of your followers or windows of time that may work well for multiple time zones.

3. Use hashtags! As many as possible. Experiment with adding both conservation-related hashtags as well as others that may reach users in allied professions. For our account we like to post them as the first comment immediately after sharing the photo to avoid cluttering the original caption. Conservation students from Queen's University (@queens_art_conservation) have been trying to grow the hashtag #thisisconservation, and we hope you will adopt it as well!

To read all 10 tips and the WUDPAC account managers' conclusions about using social media, read pages 30-31 of the October 2019 edition of News in Conservation, here.