Understanding museum social media experiences

Social media has become an omnipresent part of everyday communication and museums
could not but embrace this communicative form to spread their message. Regardless, current
methods to evaluate and assess activity on museum social media based on metrics and
analytics provided by the social platforms are unable to capture the context, the specificities
and the complexity of how communication unfolds. This dissertation takes a different
approach. Repositioning museum social media from a tool or use-oriented frame to a sociocultural
frame, it gives the first word to the people who use (or do not use) these accounts,
adopting a user-centered perspective.
Employing both museological and communicative perspectives towards the use of social
media in museums, drawing on affect theory, and using methods from the tradition of
museum visitor and audience studies, it suggests a conceptual framework for the empirical
analysis and interpretation of users’ experiences in museum social media, which is
constituted by three dimensions: the behavioral, the perceptual and the affective one.
Drawing on the findings of a three-stage study conducted (surveys, interviews, analysis of
users’ comments), it provides useful insights of how users engage with museums on social
media, what they think and anticipate of museum accounts, and how they feel and sense this
engagement on social media. Furthermore, social media users who do not follow museums,
but have an interest in arts and culture, have the chance to be heard, for the first time, and
their saying is truly valuable.
Finally, this dissertation, informed by theoretical affective approaches into the analysis of
data collected from surveys, interviews and comments, enables new depth to our
understanding of how museum followers affect and are affected by museums on social
media. It also concentrates on the ways in which relational encounters are shaped between
museums and social media users, highlighting how bodies connect, feel, and relate to these
environments, and providing us with the apparatus to notice the new senses and sensibilities
that emerge.