Museums and their audience: towards dialogic communication through Social Media

Abstract

Social media (SM) platforms are gaining a leading role as a communication tool for museums, representing an important tool which these institutions can use to engage with their audience. Despite the strategic potential of SM, most museums exhibit a low level of social activity and are still in a phase of monologic communication with their public. In this vein, the present paper aims to investigate whether the top 3 most visited museums in Europe with an official profile on Facebook, namely the Louvre, the British Museum and Tate Modern, use this social platform merely as a marketing tool, or if, on the contrary, they exploit its potential to establish two-way (i.e., dialogic) communication. The results of the analysis show that, although the museums in question are turning to SM increasingly often, their approach continues to be exclusively communicational; indeed, the interactions between the museums and their public are very limited.