Title: Stakeholder engagement via Facebook: an analysis of world's most popular museums

Authors: Vincenzo Scafarto; Federica Ricci; Gaetano Della Corte; Carla Morrone

Addresses: Department of Human, Social and Health Sciences, University of Cassino and Southern Lazio, Cassino, Italy ' Department of Law and Economics of Productive Activities, University of Rome 'Sapienza', Rome, Italy ' Department of Law and Economics of Productive Activities, University of Rome 'Sapienza', Rome, Italy ' Department of Business and Economics, University of Naples 'Parthenope', Naples, Italy

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Facebook; follower engagement; social media; museums.

DOI: 10.1504/IJDCET.2020.105887

International Journal of Digital Culture and Electronic Tourism, 2020 Vol.3 No.1, pp.6 - 21

Received: 30 Mar 2019
Accepted: 21 May 2019
Published online: 16 Mar 2020 *