Media Mavens: In conversation with Stephanie
An art professional turned social media pro, Stephanie Burdzy has grown the @artcaninstitute account by 350% since she started posting to the organization’s accounts. How did she do it? By focusing on building a community who didn’t know they were art lovers yet.
Tasked with growing the Art Canada Institue’s - an organization focused on educating Canadians on art history and contemporary Canadian art - social media pages, she took to the task with her love and understanding of art and passion to bring it to as many people as possible.
We chatted with Stephanie about creating social media posts with joy as the main factor, and what tips she has for others in the not-for-profit space about how your passion can be shared with others through Instagram posts.
Cleo: When you went out to grow the @artcaninstitute social media presence, what kind of community did you want to build? How has it affected your everyday to watch this community grow?
Stephanie: At first, my only concrete goals were to gain more followers. Though I knew our brand, I didn’t know our audiences yet. I didn’t have a clear sense of who our existing followers were, what kind of content they wanted to see, or what type of content I needed to create to attract new followers. As I learned more about our audiences over time, I have come to realize that we all have an insatiable desire to be informed, surprised, and elevated by beautiful experiences of culture. Art is life-giving. You need only to look at it for a second to know this, deeply. What our followers have taught me is that you don’t need to understand art to love it, but it certainly helps if you have a friendly guide to take you on your journey. With this in mind, I set out to build an audience that shares the Art Canada Institute’s passion for art and learning, and to appeal to new audiences with arresting images and inspiring but accessible texts and stories. Most of all, I wanted to build a community of art lovers who don’t know they’re art lovers yet. When our followers tell us how grateful they are for our posts because they’re learning about an artist for the first time, I know I’ve done my job.
Cleo: How do you plan your social media content? What do you use as inspiration to come up with content plans?
Stephanie: I maintain a calendar for my posts and do a lot of my planning and all of my writing there. From year to year, my amazing colleagues have helped me to identify perennial dates that I can peg striking visual content to (for example, holidays and important events in the history of Canadian art). I spend the remaining half of my planning time researching contemporary and historical artists, discovering kindred art accounts, reading up on current exhibitions and happenings in the Canadian and international art worlds (as if they’re somehow separate—but that’s a topic for another post), and blocking out time in my planning calendar for posting content related to the Art Canada Institute’s releases. We launch six online art books per year, publish up to four print books, create six online exhibitions, and host up to a dozen events, so there is plenty of rich material for me to celebrate and promote on our accounts.
Based on the type of content I’m creating, I’ll also use apps like Later and Hootsuite to queue up posts in advance. This doesn’t really save me time, but it does help me stay organized and feel in control of my upcoming posts and vision. By my nature, I tend to be more whimsical and ad hoc in my ‘planning’, so the apps help guide the cement but still allow me to remain flexible and responsive to shifting events and circumstances. As I move through my day I’m overwhelmed by inspiration from all sides. There is no shortage of creative work to champion and to be inspired by, and most of this inspiration comes to me in a more fluid and less structured way, so I like to be able to change my mind and not lose all my work. Perhaps I had an inspiring and life-giving call with an artist friend, and it made me want to feature their work instead of what I had originally planned. I change my mind often and I like to iterate.
Cleo: What do you find works best on your social media channels to engage your audience and bring more people into the Canadian art world?
Stephanie: I seize any opportunity to post about artists whose work is multi-dimensional and appeals to those who follow accounts related to more than one creative discipline or past-time. If I can find a way to connect an artist’s work to things that we all universally enjoy, such as family, travel, food, craft, sports, and music, I tend to see great returns. Avoiding heavy and challenging art-speak is also really important to my organization’s brand identity and mandate. We believe in making Canada’s art and its history an accessible and multi-vocal conversation, and that means that I have to speak confidently and authoritatively through our accounts in a way that is still down-to-earth and approachable. Usually, a bright and excited voice emerges from the crowd out there, and she draws you into the works to learn more.
Cleo: What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to social media?
Stephanie: My greatest challenge has been a personal one; that is, it took me a long time to gain confidence and accept my identity as a ‘social media professional’, with all the responsibilities and opportunities that come with it. Before joining the Art Canada Institute full-time, I was on a fairly conventional and rigorous academic and professional trajectory of working in museums. What I have learned is that, while just about everyone in the museum world has a social media presence and recognizes the important role social media plays in promoting the country’s incredible cultural products, I think there is a general stigma around what we do. It is as if our work is still somehow viewed as superfluous or within the sole purview of youth culture, and that content creation and audience engagement isn’t an effective use of one’s working time. I’ve participated in this phenomenon and thus been part of the problem, too: I was late to the social media game as a young person, and I suppose I tried to adopt an iconoclastic attitude towards it (“I’m too punk for TikTok”, etc.). I’m happy to report that I’ve come around to the fact that I make a living sharing beautiful words and images. I recognize the great privilege and joy inherent in that statement.
*Note: we’ll be releasing tips on how to start educating yourself on social media even if you’re new to it later this month, follow @cleo.social to stay up to date.
Cleo: What advice would you give to a social media manager at a not-for-profit about growing their social media accounts?
Stephanie: This might sound glib or counterproductive, but my advice is to post whatever you like. And like what you post! As an artist and an art historian, I have strong opinions and eclectic tastes, and so I believe that I can’t post something on my work account that I wouldn’t want to live on my personal account. When you are sharing images and texts that you LOVE, I think that joy is infectious. The followers just come.
Of course, you must be on-brand—this is an inescapable reality of building and maintaining a social presence—but if you can’t find joy in what you’re posting, it shows. Nothing feels worse to me than setting up a content plan that I don’t have full creative control over, that I don’t authentically ‘own’. I need the freedom to adapt and explore, and I insist on being involved in content creation and its final delivery, even when I have assistance from my teammates. When your content isn’t a genuine representation of your unique taste and voice, such as when you’ve shared an image or typography that looks slick but maybe doesn’t match your original aesthetic vision for the post, I believe that your audience can feel your lack of engagement with the content, and by extension, the brand.
If and when that happens, just delete it! Who cares. Delete it (fast), and try again.
When I’m training new staff members at my organization I like to use what I call my Chocolate Box Analogy to describe my approach to curating visual content for our social accounts and online and print publications. When you have very limited space to share something that you’re passionate about, your posts have to be surprising, unique, and beautiful. You do not have the luxury of time or space, so please make it count. Think of a chocolate! It’s sweet, it’s tasty, it’s sensual, and it’s beautiful, but the sensation of pleasure that one derives from the experience of a chocolate is fleeting. You would be disappointed if you opened a chocolate box and they were all the same flavour, right? (Unless you’re like me and you can scarf down one of those Ferrero Rocher pyramids in a single sitting.) So, ask yourself: Is that is the BEST version of the image you’re sharing? Is that the BEST work by that artist? Could you say this in fewer, simpler words? Then bask in the glow of your chocolates, I mean grid.
Cleo: And a fun one to finish off, what’s your favourite way to take a break from work!?
Stephanie: (Do us social professionals ever really take a break from work?) I’m inspired by everything I encounter in my day-to-day that has the potential to become content, so while I can’t fully unplug, I try to carve out untouchable space on weekends for my loved ones. I love to clean—how boring!—go for punishingly long walks, cook extravagant meals for my partner, and listen to my records. The pandemic has given me the time and space to learn how to drive, and that has given me so much freedom to quite literally escape to the country to canoe, fish, and spot cute animals before I start all over again on Monday.