Museum social media: exhibitions, stories and visitor info

Good museum social media does three jobs at once: it sells the current exhibitions, it shares the collection in a way that makes people curious, and it tells visitors exactly when and how to come. The museums that do it well use one house frame for the institution, give each exhibition its own colour world inside that frame, and treat visitor information as a design system rather than a scramble every bank holiday.

Who a museum feed is talking to

Before you design anything, be honest about the audiences. Each wants something different from the same account, and a feed that serves only one of them leaves the rest scrolling past. Plan a mix across the month, much as you would with content pillars.

A series look for each exhibition

Temporary exhibitions are the museum's headline acts, and each deserves a look people recognise across posters, posts, banners and the shop. The trick is to keep the museum's frame fixed (logo position, typeface, layout) and let the exhibition change the colour and atmosphere inside it. Visitors learn both: this is the museum, and this is that show. Sub-brands explains the same idea for companies.

Object stories from the collection

The permanent collection is a museum's greatest content advantage: thousands of objects, each with a story nobody else can tell. A short carousel built around one object rewards the curious and gives people a reason to save it and come back. Run it as a weekly series with a fixed name and the same first slide, so followers start to look out for it.

1. 1

   Slide 1: the hook

   A question or a surprising line in the series frame. "Why does this jug have two faces?"

2. 2

   Slide 2: the object

   A clean photograph, whole and uncropped, with its credit line beneath.

3. 3

   Slides 3 and 4: the story

   Two short paragraphs at most, one idea per slide. Detail shots help.

4. 4

   Slide 5: where to see it

   Gallery and floor, plus opening hours. This turns curiosity into a visit.

Opening hours and visitor info that stay right

Visitor information is the least glamorous post a museum makes, and one of the most useful. People search for it, screenshot it and share it with whoever they are visiting with. It goes wrong in two ways: it is hard to read, or it is out of date. Fix both with a fixed template you update rather than redesign.

• Opening hours as one block, days on the left, times on the right, with the last entry time.
• Closures and changes in the same frame with one bold line: "Closed 25 and 26 December".
• Late openings as their own recurring card so regulars recognise them.
• Access: step free routes, quiet hours and facilities, written plainly.
• Getting here: the nearest station or bus and where to park, if there is anywhere.

Education and family posts

Learning programmes fill the building on weekdays and in school holidays, but they compete for attention with the exhibitions. Name the audience in the first words of the design, "For schools", "For families", "Adult course", so the right people stop and everyone else scrolls on without feeling sold to. Teachers book a term ahead, so post school programmes before the term they are for, and family activities two to three weeks before each holiday.

Running museum social media as a team

Curators, the education team, marketing and front of house all have something to post. Without a system you get five looks and five voices. Shared templates fix most of it: an exhibition launch, an object story, an event card and a visitor info card cover most weeks. Behind the scenes content from conservators and technicians fills the rest and is often what followers love most.

In Gradiently, each exhibition can be a brand of its own under one account, with its Mark, palette and fonts in a brand kit, while the museum's frame lives in shared templates. With Pro, team workspaces give curators editor access and volunteers viewer access, comments keep sign off in one place, and every launch post resizes to every size in one step.