One Year and 1580 Tweets
By: Cathy Pilkington
Tags: Marketing, Lockdown, Social Media, Museums, Arts And Entertainment

Marking the 12-month anniversary of the first lockdown while we’re still in a lockdown feels like a cruel joke.

Working in social media means I spend a lot of time on it (a lie I tell myself to feel somewhat less awful as I close Twitter on my laptop and immediately open it on my phone). For the past year I have been privy to everyone’s collective trauma; from the initial ‘it’ll only be for a few weeks’ posts, the ‘who has it harder, parents or single people’ debates, the viral tweets looking for human connection and the ones announcing they had lost loved ones. I‘ve seen it all, the highs, the lows, and all the memes born of a year of chaos, heartbreak and ‘unprecedented’ events that became more precedented with every passing day.

While I write a ‘one year ago we closed our doors’ post and reflect on being a museum that suddenly had to operate without a building (as they all did), and all the things we achieved, I find myself so fed up with having to be positive all the time. It’s exhausting. Being creative is almost impossible when all your energy goes on surviving. Sometimes I just want to tweet ‘look, it’s been a shit year and we know it has and our social media manager is TIRED so we’re logging off’, but I don’t think that would go down well with anyone except maybe other social media managers.

The day before the museum closed, I had a panic attack on the train home. The next day, I was responsible for communicating to our visitors we were closing and then, suddenly, I was the museum. So not only was I dealing with the fact that we were in a pandemic and the impact it was having on my mental health (how very unprecedented), but a very large weight had landed on my shoulders overnight. It was A Lot.

I consider myself lucky really. The museum has hundreds of thousands of digitised objects already that I can share. I have the unwavering support and, more importantly, trust of my team and the knowledge and expertise of curators whose job it is to literally know about things, so I don’t have to (as much). Collaboration has been such a saviour and it’s one of the things I hope we keep doing when we reopen. And, somewhat selfishly, I have enjoyed not needing to churn out six sales posts a week.

Everything I do is measured. I can track my own mental health through engagement rates. I can see when everyone was struggling through low impressions. Working in social media is sometimes like opening a door, throwing something in and quickly closing it again, but sometimes it’s a reminder that you’re not alone, that there are real people there liking what you do. I’ve changed how I measure my success as time goes on; if I make a handful of people smile with one of my posts at this point I’m happy.

Every day is a struggle. My head feels emptier with every passing day. My best ideas usually come to me late on Sunday nights after a weekend of not thinking about work at all. I feel at my least motivated and productive when I’m sat, alone in my flat where I’ve been for the past year, staring at a computer screen hoping inspiration arrives. You’d think that working from home would offer an increased flexibility with how I work, but it has just lead me to feel guilty if I take time away and don’t respond to Teams messages instantly.

I feel a rising pressure to just get this over with and get back to ‘normal’ without looking at whether normal was even working. The race to reopening is on, but I hope that if we reflect on what we’ve achieved from lockdown in another 12 months, we talk about how much more accessible we are and our greater awareness of individual needs.