See the Post >
This content was part of a special series created for the Smithsonian Museum Affiliates’ #ShowUsYourFlowers campaign
View samples from the feed
play the Reels below
The Assignment:
Social Media Strategy & Content Creation
FOR the Eudora Welty House & Garden Instagram and Facebook Feeds
Designed to…
ENCOURAGE Millennial, Gen X, and Boomer women on Instagram and Facebook who enjoy content about gardens, history, and literature
TO engage with the EWHG account (follow, like, share, and comment)
BY curating an active feed of scenic images from the grounds to tell a cohesive story of Eudora Welty, her garden, and her home. Our tools? Eye-popping photographs paired with interesting captions, video content like stories and reels that entertains while it educates, and branded graphics to promote onsite events using the colors and typefaces from the Brand Elements Package.
Fact: Creating social media content without a social media strategy is rarely time well spent.
Social Media Strategy
For this project I first established the social media strategy, which supports the desired goals. In this case, prioritizing a smaller but highly engaged following of people who mostly lived in driving distance (and therefore could reasonably become an in-person guest) was more preferable than building a huge following of far-flung people who are less likely to visit in person.
Social media content pillars
recurring content pillars upon which to build weekly posts and videos. Social media content must be tightly curated around recurring themes, so a palette of social media content pillars usually consists of 3-5 themes around which individual pieces of content are created. For EWHG, those pillars are:
- Eudora Welty (historic images, quotes from her work, and stories from her life)
- The Welty garden (color photos of the garden today; historic images; light educational content with gardening tips and why heirloom plants matter
- The Welty House (modern and historic images, stories of the home’s history, and tidbits of the artifacts within)
- Community events (promoting the many onsite and virtual events our followers enjoy attending)
Social media content creation
From there, I created content for Instagram and Facebook, including photography, video content, and captions engineered to encourage engagement, from summer 2019 to spring of 2024. I also supervised, edited, and proofread content produced by other members of the team to ensure a cohesive look and brand voice.