Title: Museums and their audience: towards dialogic communication through social media?

Authors: Marco Contri

Addresses: Department of Economics and Management, University of Pisa, Via Cosimo Ridolfi 10, 56124 Pisa, Italy

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.

Keywords: dialogic communication; social media; Facebook; museums.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDCET.2020.105886

International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism, 2020 Vol.3 No.1, pp.22 - 35

Received: 13 Mar 2019
Accepted: 29 May 2019
Published online: 16 Mar 2020 *