The Museum’s Online Audience

Social media became one of the most recent trends among museums, especially the social networking site Facebook proved to be useful and promising. However, previous studies show that its use is still problematic and inefficient. Thus far, only few studies focused on the demand side of social media. The demand side is understood as reasons and expectations of the online audience. This research investigates quantitatively what influences the engagement of individuals in social media of museums with the aim to find out whether social media indeed creates a better communication. In total, 169 surveys were collected from Facebook pages of art museums in the Netherlands - a pioneer in social media use in Europe. The results show that by using social media, museums partly achieve to reach new audiences and strive for an online community. However, online content creation and a democratization of the online content remain problematic.