Five Ideas Museums Can Use to Transform Their Social Media

Here’s a question worth asking: What does a cardboard banana have to do with digital transformation at a national museum?

The answer, it turns out, reveals something fundamental about how cultural institutions can succeed online. Megan Jones, Digital Content Manager at National Museums Scotland recently shared with MuseumNext how her team have spent a year doing something most museums struggle with: giving themselves permission to experiment.

This isn’t a story about viral hits or massive budgets. It’s about building a culture where trying something new matters more than getting everything perfect. Where a curator holding a prop banana can teach you more about audience connection than a dozen strategy documents.

What follows are five ideas drawn from that year of experimentation—each one achievable, each one tested, and each one offering a different lens on what it means to do social media well when you’ve got twelve million objects and limited resources.

Idea One: Structure Enables Spontaneity (Not the Other Way Around)

When Jones joined National Museums Scotland about two years ago, she inherited a digital media team in transition. The content team had been pared back. A new website was in development. Her role as Digital Content Manager was newly created.

The natural instinct might have been to impose rigid planning to establish control. Instead, Jones did something more interesting: she built structure specifically designed to enable flexibility.

Monthly content meetings became standard. The team started planning their calendar a month in advance, cross-referencing with the multimedia production pipeline. Exhibition planning got its own separate content sessions to ensure cohesive campaigns. They adopted tools like Notion for content calendars and Sprout for scheduling.

But here’s the crucial part: they deliberately left gaps.

“We leave a little bit of room for flexibility within that too, and the ability to be reactive to anything that’s going on,” Jones explained. When sunlight hit the Grand Gallery just right, they could grab it. When a curator had a spontaneous idea, they could test it. When the Edinburgh Tram campaign launched, they could shoot a playful video at 6 AM on an iPhone.

The conventional wisdom says structure kills creativity. Jones’s experience suggests the opposite: without structure, you’re too busy firefighting to be creative. With it, you’ve got the bandwidth to notice opportunities and the team alignment to act on them quickly.

Idea Two: Your Best Content Might Happen at 6 AM on a Tram

Edinburgh Trams wrapped one of their vehicles in National Museums Scotland branding. The marketing team led the partnership. Nice visibility. Good PR win.

The content team saw something else: an opportunity for playful, social-first content that would launch the campaign with personality rather than polish.

So they showed up at six in the morning, iPhone in hand, and filmed something that gave a subtle nod to Trainspotting. Shot entirely on an iPhone. No big production crew. Just responsive thinking with a social-forward approach.

Result? Around 31,000 views. And a demonstration that a year’s worth of iPhone practice had fundamentally changed what the team could do.

This wasn’t a one-off. Jones pointed to the Galloway Hoard partnership with the British Museum as another example—a silver-lidded vessel video that hit a quarter million views on Instagram alone. Digital storytelling sitting alongside physical loans and touring exhibitions. Different organizations, shared audience, amplified reach.

The lesson isn’t “do more partnerships.” It’s this: collaborations create cultural visibility that no single institution can manufacture alone.

Jones noted they’re now working to define their rules of engagement around collaborations—what they do, why they do it, when they do it—because as Instagram introduces features like reposts alongside collaborations, the need for clarity with partners and colleagues becomes essential.

Idea Three: The Cardboard Banana Principle

A curator. A camera. A straightforward Q&A about an exhibition theme. Low resource—less than an hour to film, minimal editing time. Standard museum content, really.

Then someone introduced a cardboard banana.

What happened next wasn’t in the script. The curator’s reaction was genuine, unexpected, and hilarious. “Nothing could have prepared him for that cardboard banana,” Jones recalled.

The team ended up with three versions: a five-minute film for YouTube, a straight cutdown for Instagram and Facebook, and a blooper reel featuring just the behind-the-scenes moments.

The behind-the-scenes version performed the best—nearly double the engagement of the polished cut.

Jones was candid: “I know that blooper behind-the-scenes content isn’t especially groundbreaking for the sector, lots of us have done it, but in the context of National Museums Scotland, it is our first real foray into it.”

But here’s what matters: this only works if you’ve built internal trust.

Creating content that shows personality requires curators who feel comfortable being themselves on camera. That trust doesn’t happen overnight. Jones’s team spent a year building those relationships through repeated experiments. They needed to create an environment where a curator could hold a cardboard banana and not worry about looking undignified.

You can’t fake authenticity. But you can create conditions where authentic moments are more likely to happen.

Jones emphasized that resource consideration matters: “How much resource we put into making it” is a key metric alongside reach and engagement. The cardboard banana video was low-effort, high-impact. Compare that to the next format they tried.

Idea Four: Even Good Ideas Need Interrogation

Animated explainers seemed smart. Take complex collection stories, distill them into digestible animations. Script them carefully. Use their assistant producer Ellen as voiceover—challenging the assumption that only curators could speak for collections content.

Resource-heavy on editing, but low on stakeholder sign-off. Just script approval and storyboarding up front, then final curator approval at the end. The team enjoyed producing them. New skill development.

The videos were well-crafted, clearly explained, professionally produced.

Jones was admirably direct: “Just to be really candid about this. These haven’t landed the way that we hoped they would, especially given the resources that we put into them. They tend to be solidly in the realm of good and well-received and fine in terms of performance.”

Here’s where many organizations would either double down defensively or abandon the format entirely. Jones did neither. The team is continuing to trial explainers with different content strands to understand what drives performance. Their next step? Testing the format with a “big hitter”—a classic collection story audiences already love.

This is the unglamorous heart of experimentation: honest reflection matters more than confident execution.

Good ideas still need data. Well-produced content still needs audience validation. Sometimes the right answer isn’t “make more” or “stop making them”—it’s “test the variables until we understand what’s actually working.”

Even when you enjoy making something, even when it develops team skills, the audience gets the final vote.

Idea Five: When the Audience Tells You Something, Listen—Then Push Further

The Carnyx film was different. An Iron Age horn. Shot on iPhone. Low-resource. But it represented something new: a fuller embrace of internet vernacular and tropes.

Jones described it as “a culmination of our use of that informal video, increase in evergreen production, and foray into an appropriately light and funny tone.”

It became one of their top five posts of all time. Currently sitting at around one million views and counting.

Then they posted about the Orkney Hood. Two million views across Facebook and Instagram. Their top-performing content ever.

Both in September. Both featuring a light, informal approach to objects audiences already loved. September’s stats compared to the previous year? Engagements up 130%. Impressions up 75%.

But the real insight came from stepping back: historic textiles kept showing strength. Not just the Orkney Hood. Also content about textiles from the Arnish Moor man. Conservation of jack boots. Repeatedly.

So now the team is planning how to embed textile content consistently in their calendars. Not randomly when they think of it. Strategically, to uplift the more structured programme-aligned content around it.

Jones also noted they’re using their newfound confidence to explore working with high-profile stakeholders on collaborative content, and they’re dipping into YouTube Shorts—posting their backlog of Instagram reels at around two per week, using it as keyword copywriting practice to understand how YouTube works as a platform.

Most museums have audiences telling them what they want. Engagement data is a conversation, not a mystery. The Carnyx and the Orkney Hood weren’t flukes—they were signals.

As Jones put it: “Leaning into the ‘internet’ with a solid collection story, using what you know works, that you know already hits with physical and digital audiences, is a timeless recipe.”

The question isn’t whether your audience is communicating preferences. They are. The question is whether you’re structured to notice, and then whether you’re willing to lean into what’s working rather than what you assumed would work.

What Actually Changed

At the start of the year, the team thought they were beginning to understand their baseline: around 1.5 million impressions per month.

Then came the tram. Then the Carnyx. Then the Hood.

“There’s pieces like the Tram, the Carnyx, the Hood have blown that out of the water,” Jones said. “So we’re now resetting and considering those big moments as they occur more frequently for us.”

The numbers tell the story:

• Impressions: 18 million for the year, up 12%
• Engagements: up 110%
• Follower growth: significant increases

But here’s what really changed: the team stopped waiting for permission to try things.

The Real Takeaway

Museums don’t fail at social media because they lack resources or production budgets. They fail because they’re structured to prevent the kind of experimentation that makes social media work.

Jones’s closing message was simple: “It speaks to letting your content teams lead with their creativity.”

That cardboard banana could have stayed a random prop in someone’s office. Instead, it became a symbol of what happens when an organization decides that testing ideas matters more than protecting against failure.

You’ve got millions of objects. Talented curators. Stories that span centuries. The content isn’t your problem.

Your problem is whether you’re willing to shoot something at six in the morning on an iPhone. Whether you’ll let a curator hold a cardboard banana. Whether you can build structure that enables spontaneity rather than killing it.

Jones emphasized they’ll be “making calendar room for those creative content planning sessions, the ‘Content Christmases’, and keeping team resource and creativity forefront.”

Try ideas. Test them. Learn from them.

And keep space in the calendar for the ideas that haven’t emerged yet.

Megan Jones, Digital Content Manager at National Museums Scotland spoke at the Museums & Social Media Summit.