Collaboration
Our placement was at the Scarborough Historical Museum, which is located on 1000 Brimley Road, Scarborough, Ontario, and was founded in 1962. Tristan Simpson, a graduate of Ryerson’s journalism program, was our supervisor at the museum. During our service-learning placement sessions, we helped Tristan increase the museum’s cumulative outreach through the utilization of social media. To achieve our goal, we aided Tristan in his application for an Instagram account for the museum, completed a series of how-to guides pertaining to various social media outlets such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Canva, and Hootsuite, and analyzed the social media pages of Toronto’s various museums to see what type of posts would attract the most attention from audiences. The how-to guides were meant to help incoming employees with the museum’s various social media pages. We also took various pictures of the site, and a few of our group members helped Tristan produce advertisement posters for the museum’s Twitter and Facebook pages. For the Instagram page, we researched the platform’s statistics, such as the target audience, best mediums to post, and the best time or times to post.
​
Canva has proven helpful in creating advertisement posters for the museum’s Twitter and Facebook pages. Hootsuite has also proved useful to our service-learning placement project, as it is a multi-social media platform manager that allowed us to post on multiple social media platforms with ease, and it is also a great advertisement and promotional tool for the Scarborough Historical Museum. Through the platform’s manager, users can schedule the release of posts and post the same content to several platforms. At the conclusion of our placement, we have gained valuable skills in the fields of research and have also been given the chance to explore Scarborough’s local history. By being exposed to and working with various forms and social platforms, we have been given the ability to study the trends set by social media users in order create better awareness for the museum and to ultimately aid in the promotion of Scarborough’s local history.
