Social Media Reinvented: How Museums Captured Gen Z’s Attention
Museums and heritage sites around the world embraced some of the biggest pop culture social media trends this year, including 'brat summer'
As we reach the end of the year, it’s time to look back on the social media trends that museums, galleries, libraries and archives joined in with this summer and autumn: all things brat (thanks to singer-songwriter Charli XCX’s album) and ‘very demure, very mindful’ (thanks to TikTok user Jools Lebron), with a focus on Gen Z audiences.
Heritage sites that tried these trends in their posts saw a huge increase in views and engagement, with some seeing over 1 million views of a simple Instagram Reel or TikTok video.
These trends really took hold thanks to Gen Z social media users: those born from 1997 – 2012. They make up 60% of TikTok users, and also spend a lot of time on Instagram. Charli XCX also has a large Millennial following: those born from 1981 – 1996. The two age groups are key targets for audience engagement in the museum and heritage sector, so anything you can do to reach these demographics (whilst sticking to your brand values and house style) is worth trying.
Museums are brat
Brat (released on 7 June 2024) was one of the summer’s hottest albums around the world, driven by simple branding: the word ‘brat’ in lowercase, slightly blurred, on a lime green background. Gen Z and Millennials began categorising things as ‘brat’ that used line green: books, clothes, décor, and artwork. Charli herself declared it was ‘brat summer’ on 14 June and later went viral for saying that Kamala Harris (Vice-President of the USA and Democrat Presidential candidate for the November elections) is brat.
The British Museum renamed itself the ‘bratish museum’ on Instagram; Chicago Public Library connected its summer reading challenges to the trend; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam shared a Roy Lichtenstein artwork, As I Opened Fire, which heavily uses the word ‘brat’. LBJ Library had 2.4 million views of a letter in its archive written by a child, to President Lyndon B. Johnson, calling her sister a brat.
Other accounts who joined in ranged from the Design Museum Brussels to Stratford Perth Museum, and the High Museum of Art, which has its own teenage-focused TikTok account.
User-generated content also played a part in this trend for museums and heritage sites, particularly on X (formerly Twitter). Frane Babarovic (@FBabarovic), exploring bird plumage at Ghent University, showed off his brat-coded lime green latex gloves as he held a taxidermy bird at the university’s museum.
Mike Hill (michaeldoron), a history teacher, told us ‘The spy museum in Berlin is brat’; user mangodiaspora found brat green in the Hall of Asian Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History. Doctorate student hypaura shared that her brat summer involved being locked in a dingy room in the German Federal Archives for the next 15 days (at least, according to Google Translate).
Over on TikTok, user _rosedawn3 showed how she was listening to Brat whilst making crafts for museum toddler groups, virgotherachel listened to the album in the Rijksmuseum’s medieval art exhibition, and kirstennjohnson spent brat summer at the London Transport Museum.
Demure and mindful content
‘Very demure, very mindful’ were two key phrases in a viral TikTok video by influencer Jools Lebron, viewed 52.7 million times since it was posted on 2 August 2024. TikTok allows you to extract the sound from one video and use it in another, so users quickly grabbed sound clips to use in their own content. Jools, a trans woman, was able to make money from engagements with the original TikTok video, which has helped her pay for gender-affirming surgery.
We spotted great demure and mindful videos from the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, Brussels Museums, Catalina Museum, Schloss Moyland, and Arizona State Library, Archives and Public Records.
There were also fun photo-led posts from Saint Louis Art Museum, AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario), Vancouver Art Gallery, Portland Art Museum, the Heard Museum, PEI Museum and Heritage Foundation, Royal Cornwall Museum, and others.
Certain sites, like McClung Museum, Hampshire Cultural Trust and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, even connected the trend to reminders of visiting rules and behaviour – this was a fun way to present the kind of information that people sometimes ignore.
Gen Z marketing scripts
The ‘very demure, very mindful’ quote was often worked into fun videos presented by older staff members, framed as ‘Letting Gen Z write our marketing script’. Suddenly we saw staff in their fifties, sixties and seventies saying things like ‘very demure, very mindful’, ‘slay’, ‘lit’, ‘fire’ and ‘no cap’. They were, of course, in on the joke. Some of the biggest successes here were Beamish Museum and Hever Castle, both in the UK, with 5.8 million views and 469,000 views respectively on TikTok.
Others who took part included Gympie Regional Libraries (‘the most sigma day out’), Holkham Estate (‘the architect understood the assignment’), Milwaukee Public Library, the House of European History, Wellington Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Coal Mining Museum, and the Holburne Museum.
By playing up to clichés about Gen Z language, and how weird it sounds when another generation tries to use those phrases, these social media posts break down barriers. People who wouldn’t normally have clicked on the profile of a castle or a gallery were suddenly given a virtual guided tour.
Outtakes from these scripted videos have also attracted attention for the likes of the National Justice Museum and Milwaukee Public Library (viewed 1.5 million times on TikTok). The Royal Armouries in Leeds even appeared on the UK national news.
Sharing these outtakes – the mistakes and pauses made during filming – makes your museum or heritage site feel more approachable, and reminds viewers that staff and volunteers are just like them. It’s also quick to make this video from the footage you cut earlier.
Of course, all trends must come to an end. On 2 September, Charli XCX tweeted (all in lowercase, to be on-brand): ‘goodbye forever brat summer.’ This encouraged some museums and heritage sites to give autumn a catchy title, such as ‘taxidermy autumn’ from Manchester Museum.
We don’t know what the next viral trend will be, or whether it will fit your museum, gallery, library or archive, but don’t be afraid to join in if you have something in your collections to fit the theme.