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ABSTRACT
Attracting visitors and engaging them effectively in the highly competitive and saturated environment shaped by Web 2.0 and online social networking forces museums to creatively and purposefully examine channels for extended interaction with audiences. This exploratory and comparative research aims to compare the state of social media strategies across museums of two regions and to identify the influence of applied strategies on users’ reactions. The surveyed sample considers 296 museums from two European capitals—Berlin and Prague—whose activity has been observed during a three-month period. The findings identify the differences in the approaches of museums and suggest that the frequency and characteristics of published messages correlate to the level of fan reactions, facilitating targeted relationship-building possibilities with online audiences. They further imply that the museums can influence the engagement of visitors by focusing on the particular properties of their posts, both in the sense of post structure, media application, and underlying semantic features.
Funding
This article is a result of the research project “Effective methods for the increase of national and European competitiveness of small and medium enterprises in the field of culture,” registered with the Ministry of Culture (program NAKI) under the number MKDF11P01OVV024.
Notes
1. Internet World Stats, data accessed on June 2014 (Statista Citation2014).
2. Pew Research Center published, in 2013 (Thomson et al. Citation2013), the report “Arts Organizations and Digital Technologies,” identifying Facebook as the most common platform used by arts organizations in social media communication.
3. This Facebook feature is provided by Facebook, enabling profile owners (institutions) to inform fans of certain events and to monitor their feedback and participation.