Catalan art museums and social networks. Analysis of presence and performance

Abstract

With the spread of social networks and mobile technologies, museums can empower their communication and promotion creating a ubiquitous and constant dialogue with the public. The Catalan museums have not always been able to fully address the challenge of this revolution, standing in an ambivalent way between rejection and enthusiasm, often following the rapid flow of digital society without a real strategy. The objective of this work is to understand how these museums are taking advantage of social platforms. It is based on the empirical and comparative analysis of a sample of 37 museums, divided by the four Catalan provinces, carried on between October and November 2015. From the collected data, this study has been focused on the most popular platforms used by the museums: Facebook (84%) and Twitter (78%). This research provides an empirical and up to date insight of the use of social networks by the art museums, putting special emphasis on the necessary distinction between the bigger museums of the city of Barcelona and the other Catalan museums. The scenario represented by the results is characterized by the presence of a few good examples of success followed by many examples still at the beginning of a conscious and successful strategy in social networking, and even by a total absence of some of them on the Web.