Museums on Twitter: three case studies of the relationship between a museum and its environment. Museum professionals on Twitter
PaperAlex Espinós, La Magnética, Spain
Published paper: Museums on Twitter: Three case studies of the relationship between a museum and its environment
In 2014 at the Museums and the Web conferences in Baltimore, Maryland, and Florence, Italy, we presented our report on how two thousand museums were relating on Twitter. After our presentation, we decided to continue our investigation in two directions:
The first are the case studies. We wanted to analyze some museums' Twitter environments: how museums are relating to their followers, how they form different communities defined by underlying relationships, the growth of the network around a museum, detection of influencers, etc. We also wanted to study how to use this information in order to design better social-media strategies for an improved and more realistic assessment of the work and actions’ results on Twitter.
Our case studies are London's Victoria & Albert, Turin's Palazzo Madama, and Barcelona's Center for Contemporary Culture. We have chosen museums with different Twitter strategies, countries, languages, and follower bases ranging from 7,000 at the time of writing this abstract (Palazzo Madama) to the 450,000 from V&A. The goal is to have different situations represented and run a useful research for museums of different sizes.
The second direction is how museum professionals are interacting with each other on Twitter thanks to the use of hashtags, like #musetech, in order to share information, questions, and experiences.
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