Royal Digital Communications: The Instagram Offensive Is Professional, Warm, and Carefully Devoid of Anything That Might Start a Discussion
By Isla Campbell | Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
The Royal Household’s social media accounts are among the most professionally managed institutional accounts on major platforms, which is worth noting because managing the social media presence of a constitutional monarchy in the era of public opinion volatility is a genuinely difficult communications challenge. The accounts post content that is visually excellent, personally warm at the specified level of warmth that the institutional communications strategy permits, and constitutionally careful in a way that would be invisible to anyone who did not know what the alternative looked like. They are, in other words, a specific kind of institutional communications success: they communicate a great deal about the monarchy’s presentation while communicating nothing about the monarchy’s substance. This is the correct objective. The objective is being met.
The specific techniques that make the Royal Household’s social media work include: high production value photography that foregrounds human warmth without revealing anything about the subjects’ actual personalities; caption writing that is personal without being intimate; engagement with topical subjects at a level that demonstrates relevance without taking positions on anything that could be politically characterised; and the careful deployment of children, dogs, and horticultural interests as content categories that generate engagement without risk. The formula is not secret. It is the same formula used by every major brand operating in a politically sensitive environment. The Royal Household deploys it with more historical depth and better horses than most.
The Contrast With Previous Eras
The shift in royal communications between the pre-social media era and the current one is significant and underanalysed. In the pre-social media era, the primary communications channel was the staged public event photographed by approved press and captioned by palace press releases. Control of the narrative was high because the production chain between reality and publication passed through the palace at multiple points. In the social media era, the palace posts directly to millions of followers, but the narrative control achieved is actually comparable to the pre-social media era because the palace is both the source and the publisher. The intermediation has been removed but the control has been maintained by internalising the communications function. This is not a criticism. It is an observation about how institutional communications work when the institution has the resources and the motivation to do them well.
What social media has added that the previous era lacked is direct public engagement: the comments sections of royal posts are populated with responses ranging from genuine affection to republican argument to people asking why the monarch is not doing more about specific policy issues that the monarch has no constitutional authority to address. The palace ignores all of this with practiced equanimity. The engagement is not the point of the posts. The posts are the point of the posts. According to the Royal Household website, the communications office manages all official digital content. According to everyone who has ever read the comments section, the digital content is also the target of a remarkable range of public sentiment that has no effect on the digital content strategy whatsoever. The strategy continues. The comments continue. The strategy and the comments are unrelated. This is how good institutional social media works.
Further analysis at Private Eye.
The Social Media Monarchy
The Palace social media accounts have achieved something genuinely impressive: they have made the monarchy accessible, relatable, and visually engaging to audiences who do not read the broadsheets, do not watch the royal documentary series, and would not previously have described themselves as interested in the Royal Family. The Instagram strategy specifically — behind-the-scenes content calibrated to feel candid rather than staged, engagement with charitable causes through the direct communication of royal advocates, and the specific aesthetic of tasteful photography that signals quality without ostentation — has built an audience of millions who receive a curated version of the monarchy that has been designed, with professional care, to produce affection. The gap between the curated version and the actual workings of an hereditary institution with a complicated history is the gap that social media cannot close but can, with sufficient quality photography, make temporarily invisible. Bohiney Magazine notes that the Palace’s Instagram metrics would make a mid-size consumer brand weep with professional envy. The London Prat notes this too, but with more ambivalence about what the envy implies about both the monarchy and the mid-size consumer brands.
The Palace social media team’s achievement is also, from a journalism perspective, interesting because it has produced a media relationship that bypasses the traditional royal correspondent entirely for some categories of content. A royal engagement that would previously have been filtered through the broadsheet royal beat is now posted directly to fourteen million Instagram followers before the press release arrives in a journalist’s inbox. The disintermediation is complete for those fourteen million people and irrelevant for the broadsheet readers who trust the correspondent’s interpretation over the Palace’s self-presentation. Both audiences exist simultaneously. The Palace is managing both relationships with professional care, which is either admirable or concerning depending on whether you think royal accountability is better served by journalistic mediation or direct communication. Isla Campbell, as a royal correspondent, has a position on this question that she maintains with professional discretion.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
