The motives behind the cultural participation of Generation Z adults in museums’ TikTok accounts.

In the last few years, museums have tended to become open, inclusive, and accessible to a wider and diverse audience (ICOM, 2022). To achieve this goal, museums and cultural organizations have utilized digital tools, like social media platforms, to make their collection more accessible and develop cultural participation of a wider audience. Recently, a new social networking site, TikTok, which is based on user-generated short videos, has met such growth by having today more than 800 million active users (Zulli & Zulli, 2022). This platform, dominated by young users born between 1995/6 to 2012 known as Generation Z (Gen Z), has started penetrating the cultural sector with many museums using it in order to attract and connect with them and make them engage with their collections (Hughes, 2021). Due to the fact that TikTok is a new platform that has recently disrupted the cultural industries and whose nascent nature has not been explored in depth by scholars, no user-oriented studies have been attempted in order to examine what are the user preferences in museum content as well as what drives their cultural participation on this platform. For this reason, the research question that guides this thesis is: What motivates the cultural participation of Generation Z adults in museums’ TikTok accounts?” and aims to provide museums with insights into how they can attract this cohort online. To answer the research question, a mixed methods approach has been chosen. 57 museum TikTok followers have completed an online survey with both quantitative and qualitative elements, in order to investigate their content preferences on TikTok from museums and what motivates them to follow them, actively interact with their content and create museum-inspired posts on this platform. The results demonstrate that the main motives behind Gen Z adults’ cultural participation are entertainment combined with education (edutainment), gathering information to plan museum visits on-site, social interaction, archiving, and the altruistic motive of supporting the museum. Self-efficacy, particularly the perceived knowledge and developed a personal interest in arts, also affects young adults' cultural participation. The main barriers behind active cultural participation on TikTok are lack of time and motive. The findings of this research, contribute to the field in both theoretical and practical ways, since they explore the use of TikTok in museum contexts from a user perspective, which lacks academic research due to the platform’s recent upsurge, while also providing museum professionals with insights into how they can attract a younger cohort into their collections. Suggestions for further research would be to broaden the sample size of participants and also to examine the role of TikTok in enhancing the physical museum visiting experience and affecting the audience’s decision-making process of visiting on-site.