Ricerc@Sapienza

Over the last few years, social media (SM) have been emphasised as
a means for organisations to foster stakeholder relationship with particular
stress on their potential to promote community building and dialogic
engagement with online audiences. These potential benefits of SM have been
claimed also with respect to cultural organisations. However, the available
research evidence on SM and museums suggests that museums still struggle to
exploit these tools to their full potential. This paper adds further evidence on
this issue by empirically investigating whether museums are using Facebook to
promote follower engagement using a sample of top-attended museums
worldwide. Results suggest that the frequency and content type of posts
correlate to some extent with the degree of follower reactions. Nevertheless,
sample museums predominantly use SM to publish promotional contents and as
a result fail to achieve a true ‘dialogic’ follower engagement.