MUSEUMS IN SOCIAL MEDIA
What makes social media relevant for arts and culture marketing: a study applied to Facebook pages of three museums in Copenhagen
Natalia Dudareva Master Thesis | Cand.soc. in Management of Creative Business Processes
84 pages, 174,300 characters Supervisor: Gurli Jakobsen, CBS Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility Copenhagen Business School, May 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work would not have been possible without the collaborations, assistance and help that I received. I would like to express my gratitude to everyone who supported me throughout this project.
Golden Days and Kulturkik provided support by sparring about the research problem and gave the invaluable help in establishing museum collaborations. The communication departments of The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection supported me by giving me the opportunity to reach to their audiences and providing the necessary background information. My friends gave me valuable feedback about my ideas and participated in testing and proofreading of the survey.
The views expressed in this work are solely of the author and do not reflect those of studied organisations or other individuals.
2 ABSTRACT
What is the relevance of social media for marketing of arts and culture museums? Who are the virtual followers of their social media? I described the users of museums’ Facebook pages, grouped them according to their motivations for following these pages, and analysed how this knowledge can be useful for marketing and communication specialists of arts and culture museums.
Three museums in Copenhagen distributed the quantitative survey developed in this work: The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection. The survey described their Facebook followers and divided them into five types: ‘Enthusiast’, ‘Connected’, ‘Contributor’, ‘Interested’, and ‘Informational’.
This research demonstrates that social media provides opportunities both for strengthening the existing audience relationships and for establishing the new ones with those who are not active in visiting museums. It identifies that many users take inspiration for the visits from the Facebook pages, and the most engaged social media followers also tend to be more active visitors. Moreover, it suggests that social media communication is becoming a cultural experience of its own.
This research places social media as a unique tool of museum marketing strategy that enables the museums to engage their audiences in direct two-way communication and co-creation of the cultural experiences. Thus its role is to supplement the other elements of museum marketing strategy by providing more opportunities for audience involvement, establishing long-term relationships, and community development.
Keywords: museums, Facebook, social media, marketing strategy, consumer behavior, relationship marketing, typology
3 TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 2
ABSTRACT 3
TABLE OF CONTENTS 4
PART 1. INTRODUCTION 6 1.1. RESEARCH QUESTION AND OBJECTIVES 7 1.2. CONCEPTUAL DELIMITATION AND ARGUMENTATION DEVELOPMENT 10 1.3. COLLABORATING MUSEUMS 14 1.3.1. THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF DENMARK 14 1.3.2. THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF DENMARK 15 1.3.3. THE DAVID COLLECTION 15 1.4. BACKGROUND OF THE RESEARCH 15
PART 2. RESEARCH METHODS 19 2.1. RESEARCH APPROACH 19 2.2. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES AND THE NEED FOR DATA 22 2.3. SAMPLING 22 2.4. DATA COLLECTION 24 2.5. SURVEY DESIGN 25 2.5.1. TYPES OF QUESTIONS 25 2.5.2. FORMULATION OF QUESTIONS 26 2.5.2.1. General information about the respondents 27 2.5.2.2. Use of Facebook 28 2.5.2.3. Museums on Facebook 29 2.5.2.4. Museum attendance 30 2.5.3. QUALITY CONTROL 31 2.6. DATA ANALYSIS 31 2.6.1. IDENTIFICATION OF PATTERNS AMONG THE RESULTS 32 2.6.2. FORMULATION OF TYPOLOGY 32 2.7. VALIDITY 34 2.8. SUMMARY 35
PART 3. LITERATURE REVIEW 36 3.1. SPECIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF MUSEUM MARKETING 36 3.1.1. GOALS OF MUSEUM MARKETING 36 3.1.2. EXPERIENTIAL NATURE OF THE CULTURAL PRODUCT 38 3.1.3. MOTIVATIONS FOR CONSUMPTION OF CULTURAL EXPERIENCES 39 3.2. SOCIAL MEDIA AS A MARKETING TOOL FOR ARTS AND CULTURE 42 3.2.1. THE NATURE OF SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING AS A RESULT OF CHANGES IN USER BEHAVIOUR 43 3.2.2. APPLICATION OF MUSEUM MARKETING TO SOCIAL MEDIA 44 3.3. RELATIONSHIP MARKETING LINKING THE MUSEUM AND ITS AUDIENCES IN SOCIAL MEDIA 46 3.3.1. AUDIENCE STUDIES REFLECTING THE VALUES AND MOTIVATIONS 48 3.4. FRAMEWORK OF LOYALTY IN APPLICATION OF RELATIONSHIP MARKETING TO MUSEUMS 50 3.5. SUMMARY 51
4 PART 4. FINDINGS 52 4.1. CHARACTERISTICS OF MUSEUM AUDIENCES ON FACEBOOK 52 4.1.1. DEMOGRAPHIC CHARACTERISTICS 52 4.1.2. FACEBOOK USE BY THE RESPONDENTS 54 4.1.3. FINDING INFORMATION ABOUT MUSEUMS 55 4.1.4. LEISURE INTERESTS 56 4.2. COMPARISON OF VISITS TO MUSEUMS AND SUBSCRIPTIONS TO THEIR THE FACEBOOK PAGES 57 4.2.1. RESPONDENTS WHO FOLLOW MUSEUMS ON FACEBOOK 58 4.2.2. VISITS TO MUSEUMS 59 4.2.3. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN VISITS AND FACEBOOK SUBSCRIPTIONS 61 4.3. FIVE TYPES OF RELATIONSHIPS 62 4.3.1. ENTHUSIAST 66 4.3.2. CONNECTED 67 4.3.3. CONTRIBUTOR 68 4.3.4. INTERESTED 69 4.3.5. INFORMATIONAL 69 4.4. SUMMARY 71
PART 5. DISCUSSION 72 5.1. HOW TO STUDY AUDIENCES OF MUSEUMS IN SOCIAL MEDIA 72 5.1.1. QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH AS A TOOL 72 5.1.2. COMPARISON WITH OTHER STUDIES 73 5.2. CONNECTION BETWEEN FOLLOWING AND VISITING 76 5.3. AN EMERGING DIGITAL AUDIENCE OF MUSEUMS 77 5.4. THE QUEST FOR PARTICIPATION 78 5.5. USING SOCIAL MEDIA AS A PART OF MUSEUM MARKETING STRATEGY 79
PART 6. CONCLUSION 81
LIMITATIONS 83
OPPORTUNITIES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH 84
BIBLIOGRAPHY 85
APPENDIX A 90
APPENDIX B 100
5 Part 1. INTRODUCTION
Social media is transforming the way people interact with each other, navigate their daily lives, and receive information, which has a profound impact on communication practices of companies and organisations across different sectors (Qualman, 2009). Museums are also seeking to find out how they can embrace these media for encouraging interaction among their audiences(Hausmann, 2012), innovating their experiences (Bakhshi & Throsby, 2012), and maintaining relationships with their consumers outside the actual visits (Petkus Jr, 2002; Yucelt, 2000).
This work is aimed at creating new knowledge about the use of social media for museum marketing. It takes the perspective of strategic marketing and puts the audience at its centre. Therefore, each step of this thesis focuses on developing knowledge about the consumers of arts and culture museums in social media. While there is a wide variety of social media platforms, I chose to concentrate on Facebook, which is one of the world’s leading social media platforms that offers opportunities both for private communication, public discussions, and interaction between individuals and companies (Qualman, 2009).
Museum marketing seeks to attract more people to visit the museum locations and to increase access to the cultural experiences they provide (N. Kotler & Kotler, 1998: p. 29). Social media offers a potential to support these goals set by museum marketing and communication. Research shows that by finding out what motivates people to like pages on Facebook and to interact with them it is possible to get a better understanding of strategies that can be used to improve communication between organisations and their followers (Wallace, Buil, de Chernatony, & Hogan, 2014). Therefore, I dedicated this research to exploring the motivations and values that underlie the decisions of Facebook users to follow and interact with the pages of museums.
Despite the fact that the use of social media is increasingly becoming integrated in the daily lives of the Danish population, research shows that only a small percentage uses these channels to experience arts and culture, and even smaller share uses the cultural experiences provided by museums through these platforms (Bak, Madsen, Henrichsen, & Troldborg, 2012). At the same time museums are developing strategies and approaches to attract the
6 numerous users of social media platforms to their online profiles (Grøn, Hansen, & Holst Mouritzen, 2013). It is therefore necessary to study what motivates the social media users to engage with museums through these platforms and how museums can use this knowledge to integrate social media into their marketing and communication strategies.
1.1. Research question and objectives
To investigate the role of social media for museum marketing I formulated the following research question that reflects the main focus of this work:
HOW IS SOCIAL MEDIA RELEVANT FOR MARKETING OF ARTS AND CULTURE MUSEUMS?
‘Relevance’ in this question means that this work is seeking to understand how social media can be used as a part of museum marketing strategy. This is an exploratory question, where the main goal is to describe the potential of using social media for the purposes of museum marketing.
Defining museums is complicated due to the variety of their kinds and approaches (N. G. Kotler, Kotler, & Kotler, 2008: p. 3). In academic research a ‘museum’ is understood as “an organised and permanent non-profit institution, essentially educational and aesthetic in purpose, with professional staff which owns and utilises tangible objects, cares for them and exhibits them to the public on some regular scheme” (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008: pp. 6-7). In this work I am expanding this definition by taking the intangible digital and online components of cultural experience into consideration on the same level as the tangible objects presented by museums.
As a discipline museum marketing is a result of a long history of research and practice in particular in applying the classical concepts of marketing to the activities of museums and the cultural experiences they provide (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008: p.21). Kotler summarizes marketing of museums in terms of identifying and satisfying the needs of the target segments, and highlights the importance of understanding what kinds of consumers attend museums, and on which of them the museums would like to focus (2008: pp. 21-22).
7 In order to delimit the broad range of possible research approaches to exploring the relevance of social media for museum marketing I formulated a range of sub-questions. The first question corresponds to the approach to museum marketing studies defined by Kotler et al. (2008), who emphasized the need to understand what types of museum consumers exist in order to focus on specific target audiences.
Sub-question #1: How can museum marketing professionals study the audiences in social media?
This question leads to an exploration of possible approaches to understand what characteristics define the audiences of museums in social media. To do that I analyse motivations and values involved in cultural consumption and in social media use, and then identify what connects them from a marketing viewpoint. Theories of relationship marketing prove to be that link and open up a perspective on strategic approach to engaging social media users of museum profiles.
By connecting the three knowledge areas (i.e. arts and culture consumption, social media environment, relationship marketing) I develop a list of characteristics that can describe the motivations and values of following a museum on Facebook. Using these characteristics I create a quantitative questionnaire as a tool to study museum audiences in social media.
Therefore, the first objective of this research is to develop a tool for studying audiences in social media that will support the formulation of marketing strategies of museums.
Developing a research tool means that I also develop an approach to analyse the results that it produces. Referring back to the approach to museum marketing defined by Kotler et al. (2008), it is necessary to understand what differentiates the consumers of museums in the environment of social media platform Facebook. The need to identify these differences and to group respondents into types leads to the formulation of the second sub-question:
Sub-question #2: What are the differences among the audience members of arts and culture museums on Facebook?
8 This question builds on the research framework described above and uses the survey results to describe the users of museums’ social media. I separate it into two main parts: description of users and typology. Description of users gives an overview of key characteristics and general differences among the followers of museums’ Facebook pages. To deepen the understanding of the audiences in social media I formulate a typology of users. It is based on the motivations and values of following museum pages on Facebook and provides insight into underlying reasons of connecting with museums through social media. The typology produced five distinct types of relationships created between museums and their followers on Facebook, which opens up a perspective on the kinds of audiences that are formed in social media as compared to the audiences who visit museums.
Therefore, the second research objective is to find out if what differentiates the followers of museums on Facebook and to divide them into types of relationships that are created in this environment.
Profiles of museums in social media networks, such as Facebook, represent them in this online environment. One of the wonderings of this research is to find out whether those who follow the museums on Facebook and communicate with them through this network are the same audiences who visit museums at their physical locations. Therefore, the third sub- question is dedicated to finding out whether there is a connection between following a museum on Facebook and visiting it in real life.
Sub-question #3: Is there a connection between following a museum on Facebook and visiting it?
Therefore, the third research objective is to find out whether there is a connection between following museums on social media and visiting them. To do that I analysed the academic literature for finding a theoretical approach to understanding this connection and used the empirical data collected through the survey to test the connection in an applied case of the three collaborating museums: The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection.
9 1.2. Conceptual delimitation and argumentation development
The main wondering that directed the choice of literature in this work is how to understand what makes museums relevant for their audiences on Facebook, and what motivates the latter to interact and communicate with the museums. The goal is to use this knowledge for improving marketing strategies of museums to strengthen the communication with their visitors and to explore the characteristics of the possible purely digital consumers of arts and culture.
Table 1.1 presents the areas of theoretical knowledge that I selected in order to develop new knowledge bout each of the sub-questions of the research. The first sub-question aims at formulating a research tool for studying museum audiences on Facebook. The starting point for formulating a tool for the use of museum marketing professionals is to collect the key defining characteristics of museum marketing. The foundational work on museum marketing strategy by Kotler et al. (2008) supported by the practical approach to museum marketing of French and Runyard (2011) and the sociological view on arts and its publics by McClellan (2003) support the general foundation of the tool by providing solid knowledge about museum marketing and its target audiences.
The academic language of arts and culture sector uses multiple ways to define the people that are purchasing or attending cultural products, services, and events. The word ‘public’ is usually used as the most general term that describes people that potentially may or may not be interested in the arts and culture product, as used by McClellan et al. (2003: p. 170). Compared to ‘public’, the word ‘audience’ often refers to the target consumers, both existing and potential (McClellan, 2003: p. 174-175). ‘Patron’ is usually defined as a consumer that has chosen to attend the arts event for a certain period of time, which means that ‘patron’ is a loyal ‘audience member’ (Guillon, 2011: p. 33).
Several terms are often used in the studies on social media and are thus also employed in this work: ‘User’ as a person who uses any kind of social media platform: from active participation and creation of content to passive observation (Parsons, 2011: p.12; Waters & Lo, 2012:
10 p.299). In applying the cultural products to social media environment I use the terms ‘user’ and ‘audience member’ interchangeably.
Table 1.1. Selection of academic literature according to the sub-questions of the research
HOW IS SOCIAL MEDIA RELEVANT FOR MARKETING OF ARTS AND CULTURE MUSEUMS? Sub-question Selected literature Marketing strategy in museums (French & Runyard, 1. How can museum marketing 2011; N. G. Kotler et al., 2008; McClellan, 2003) professionals study the audiences Environment of social media (Benkler, 2006; Parsons, in social media? 2011; Qualman, 2009; Waters & Lo, 2012) Relevance of social media for cultural organisations (Bakhshi & Throsby, 2012; Preece & Johnson, 2011) Museum communication in social media (Bertacchini & Morando, 2013; Hausmann, 2012; Kelly, 2013) Experiential nature of arts and culture product (Petkus 2. What are the differences among Jr, 2002; Yucelt, 2000) the audience members of arts and Non-economic motivations for cultural consumption culture museums on Facebook? (Bakke, 2009; Caves, 2002; Currid, 2007; Foreman- Wernet & Dervin, 2011) User behaviour in social media (Qualman, 2009; Wallace et al., 2014) Concepts of relationship marketing (Egan, 2011; Ravald 3. Is there a connection between & Grönroos, 1996) following a museum on Facebook Application of relationship marketing to arts and culture and visiting it? organisations in social media (Guillon, 2011; Preece & Johnson, 2011; Sashi, 2012) Source: Own production
In order to connect the theories of museum marketing with a study of audiences on Facebook I analysed the works that describe the motivations of using digital media (Benkler, 2006) and the use of social media for commercial and not-for-profit purposes (Parsons, 2011; Waters & Lo, 2012). I further applied these general characteristics of social media to the consumption of arts and culture using the analysis of innovation potential of online and digital media for cultural organisations by Bakhshi and Throsby (2012) and the elaboration on strategies of maintaining long-term audience relationships by Preece and Johnson (2011).
Focusing on Facebook means using the terminology of this network closely with the definitions provided by the works on arts and culture marketing. The key terms are the
11 ‘pages’, or ‘profiles’ of organizations, which they create to represent themselves to the users, and the ‘personal profiles’ of ‘users’ that are utilised by individuals to interact with others, and ‘follow’ pages by ‘liking’ them (Parsons, 2011; Waters & Lo, 2012). ‘Sharing’ and ‘liking’ of the content are also ways to spread the content to other connections and to demonstrate user’s preferences (Hausmann, 2012).
Having developed knowledge about the foundations of museum marketing and the key characteristics of online media and social networks, I explored the studies on social media applied directly to museums. It is necessary to say that there is a limited amount of studies available in this area due to the dynamic nature of social networks and their fast growth within a short period of time, and Hausmann (2012) points out to this lack of prior research in her analysis of museums’ social media communication. Nevertheless, with the perspectives on digitalisation processes in museums (Bertacchini & Morando, 2013) and the review of real- life cases of museums who use social media (Kelly, 2013) it is possible to get a theoretical perspective on the role that social media is taking up in museum strategies.
The knowledge about museum marketing in general and the application of social media to this discipline provided a foundation for formulating a tool to research museum audiences on Facebook. This tool is a quantitative survey that the three collaborating museums distributed through their Facebook pages.
The second research question explores the variety of characteristics of museum audiences in social media and provides an opportunity to support the questionnaire with the relevant questions to describe the followers of museum pages on Facebook.
In order to explore the motivations and values that underlie the decisions to follow museums in social media and interact with them I referred to the motivational structure of arts and culture consumption in general. I compared four approaches to defining values, motivations, and goals of cultural consumption presented in the works by Petkus (2002), Bakke (2009), Foreman-Wernet (2011), and Currid (2007). A perspective on the special nature of cultural products by Caves (2002) and the corresponding understanding of service quality in arts and culture by Yucelt (2000) provide the knowledge that influences the analytical applications of the results obtained through the survey.
12 To formulate the questions and produce applicable knowledge for marketing strategies I looked for works that would open up the special characteristics of social media. What is social media for its users? Why do they seek cultural experiences in social media? In order to find out how the environment of social media influences marketing practices I turned to a work by Qualman (2009), where the author elaborated on the wide array of influences that social media has on daily lives of its users and on the communication practices of companies and other kinds of organisations. A very recent research by Wallace et al. (2014)formulated a typology of Facebook users based on their motivations to ‘like’ pages of brands, share word- of-mouth information about them through own profiles, and the extent to loyalty to that brand. Moreover, this study included the personality traits and the strength of social connections of the users in order to get a deeper understanding of the ‘why’ in following brand pages on Facebook. This research provided a source of comparison for the research approach developed in this thesis, and it contributed to the discussion of the typology of relationships and its practical application to museum marketing in Part 5. Discussion.
Seeking to connect the marketing practices of museums in general with the marketing communication in social media I referred to Kotler et al. (2008) who use relationship marketing as a concept that provides an insight into this connection. This means that relationships between museums and audience members appear to play the key role in bringing the cultural product into the environment of social media. ‘Relationship’ is a very broad concept, and in this work I use this term to define any kind of interaction that happens between the cultural organisations and their consumers and the intangible attitude involved in it (Egan, 2011). The main actors in a ‘relationship’ are thus the cultural organisations on the one side and their consumers on the other. I do not focus on relationships between audience members in my study, but I elaborate what influence that have on the relationships between cultural organisations and individual consumers.
I choose the relationship marketing theories elaborated by Ravald and Grönroos (1996) and Egan (2011) to complete the understanding of this connection, and loyalty emerges as one of the key notions in building relationship marketing. Applications of relationship marketing to cultural products provided me with solid foundations for developing own empirical research that connects following museums on Facebook and visiting them at their physical locations through the lens of relationship marketing. The segmentation of cultural audiences by Guillon
13 (2011) is based on loyalty and gives a perspective of forming a typology of audiences, while Sashi (2012) places relationship marketing in the frame of social media, which supports the analytical discussion of the results.
The quantitative survey informed by the conceptual delimitation described above produced results that correspond to each of the sub-questions. A description of the Facebook audiences of museums, their division according to types of relationships based on motivations to follow museums on Facebook, and the analysis of the connection between following and visiting the museums provide the empirical data needed to respond to each sub-questions and to the research question. Completing this work I compare the concepts from the literature with the empirical results in the analytical discussion. I conclude the argumentation of this work by developing a practical application of the explored relevance of social media for the goals of museum marketing.
1.3. Collaborating museums
This research was conducted in collaboration with three museums located in Copenhagen: The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection. Each of them opened up the opportunity to share the quantitative questionnaire through their Facebook pages. This way it was possible to reach to their audiences and gather information about their general characteristics and the kinds of relationships they formed through museums’ Facebook pages.
1.3.1. The National Gallery of Denmark
The National Gallery of Denmark (dk. Statens Museum for Kunst, SMK) is the largest art museum in Denmark that presents a wide range of works both by Danish and international artists. Museum’s collection offers arts experiences demonstrating more than 700 years of art. The goal of the museum is to “contribute to redefine the museum as an institution and to help promote a creative and reflective society”. (Statens museum for kunst [website])
14 1.3.2. The National Museum of Denmark
The National Museum is Denmark (dk. Nationalmuseet) is largest museum of cultural history. It presents the history of the Danes from the ancient times to the present moment. Moreover, it also offers an insight into cultural history broad territories ranging from Greenland to South America. (Nationalmuseet [website])
1.3.3. The David Collection
The David Collection (dk. Davids Samling) is an art museum that offers three permanent collections. Its collection of Islamic Art encompasses a variety of important works describing that cultural sphere whose influence is acknowledged on an international level. It also includes the Collection of European 18th-Century Art, and the Collection of Danish Early Modern Art. (Davids samling [website])
While The National Gallery of Denmark and The National Museum of Denmark are publicly owned and financed by the state, The David Collection is a private museum financed by the C. L. David Foundation.
1.4. Background of the research
Two of the collaborating museums, The National Gallery of Denmark and The National Museum of Denmark, together with another museum, Experimentarium, conducted a research of their Facebook profiles with a focus on best practices of using this network (Grøn et al., 2013). These three museums have very different profiles: one is an arts museum, another one is a cultural history museum, and the third one is a science museum. Nevertheless, the followers of these museums showed similar behaviour in using Facebook in general (Ibid.: p. 50). What distinguished the behaviour of the audiences is the types of content that they most ‘liked’ and commented on: the patterns showed very different results comparing text updates, pictures, and links (Ibid.: pp. 50-51).
The authors elaborated on the audience reactions to different posts and concluded that the key to attracting the attention of their followers is to post stories and content that is relevant
15 to the topic of the museum instead of representing the building itself (Grøn et al., 2013: p. 60). The work argues that it is the interest in a particular topic that attracts people to ‘like’ museum pages and not that much of interest towards a specific museum building (Ibid.: p. 59). This research gives a relevant background to this thesis, since it touches upon the practical issues of Facebook use for the two of the three collaborating museums.
The article indicated that the museums have different audiences and these users react differently to the variety of content posted by the museums. By studying the motivations and values that underlie following museums on Facebook this research can deepen the knowledge available about the strategies of Facebook use for these museums and for museum marketing in general.
Another research that supports the delimitation of this research and the development of the study problem is the “Reach Out” catalogue (Haagen et al., 2008). With recent insights into cultural organisations, focus on technology and user involvement, it describes three goals for innovation in the cultural industries: attracting new audience members, improving the quality of the experience and extending this experience (Ibid.: p. 23). Despite the fact that the cases included in the catalogue demonstrate very different approaches to achieving these goals, there are several points that their practices have in common.
Cultural organisations in Denmark represented through cases in “Reach Out” appear to use three main approaches in using the online technologies in their marketing communication: involving target consumers to participate in the experience, connecting the audience members with communities of like-minded people, and bonding with the audiences through interactions (Ibid.). Social media provides opportunities for each of these practices, but the catalogue does not provide a further elaboration on their use, likely as a result of the recent appearance of the network at the time of its preparation. Therefore, a research that integrates the three approaches to innovation in the use of digital technologies, which is applied to social media, will be a logical continuation of the arguments provided by “Reach Out”.
Several facts illustrated by statistics about Danish population point out to the relevance of deeper knowledge about social media audiences for arts and culture museums. First of all, museums are actively present on Facebook (Moos, Brændholt Lundgaard, Paltved-Kaznelson,
16 & Rosenberg Sørensen, 2010: p. 13)1, and the population dedicates a significant share of Internet use to social media (Bak et al., 2012)2. At the same time the share of people who took the advantage of the online experiences available at museums’ pages, such as collections, exhibitions or cultural heritage, remains much smaller(Ibid.: p. 74) 3.
Denmark is an interesting place to study the application of web-based digital technologies and online media for several reasons. Recent research studying the cultural habits of the Danish population demonstrates that the adoption of online media in Denmark is rapidly increasing (Bak et al., 2012)4. The share of people using Internet in their free time daily has been growing significantly in the past years, and has reached a level of approximately two thirds of the population (Ibid.: p. 184)5. The time spent using the Internet is also increasing, where a large share of the population is using it more that one hour per day in their free time (Ibid.: p. 185)6.
When it comes to cultural consumption, for over 10 % of the population the everyday Internet use involves experiencing visual art like photography, painting, sculpture and similar cultural experiences (Ibid.: p. 186)7. These data demonstrate that in addition to high importance of the Internet in daily life in general, cultural experiences online have gained a significant reach.
When the arts and culture sector is considered, the share of Danish population that visited arts, culture, and other museums has significantly grown in several years as well (Ibid.: p. 68)8. The same statistics show that among those who visited the webpages and online
1 According to the research ”Museums’ online users” conducted by The Danish Ministry of Culture, 59 out of 123 Danish museums (both national and nationally acknowledged) were present on Facebook in 2010. 2 52% of the Danish population use Internet in their free time (outside work or studies) to use social media 2 52% of the Danish population use Internet in their free time (outside work or studies) to use social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.). 3 6% of those who used the websites and online offerings of the museums, exhibitions and culture heritage experienced their collections and exhibitions online. 4 ”The culture habits of the Danish population 2012” is a research conducted by Epinion A/S and Pluss Leadership A/S for the Danish Ministry of Culture. The data on museums is based on over 3200 responses, where the respondents are representing the socio-demographical characteristics of the Danish population. The comparison is made with the previous research conducted in 2004. 5 From 43% of the Danish population in 2004 to 74% in 2012. 6 41% of the total population is using Internet more than 1 hour a day in their free time. 7 13% of the population uses Internet to experience visual art (photography, painting, sculpture etc.). 8 Arts museums: from 35% of the Danish population in 2004 to 41% in 2012. Other museums (culture and natural history): from 32% of the Danish population in 2004 to 41% in 2012.
17 resources of museums a large share focused mainly on the practical information preceding the actual visit (Ibid.: p. 74)9.
The research about changes in cultural consumption in general and the data about growing Internet use and visits to museums in Denmark show that web-based media is an area where there are many questions to explore for arts and culture museums. First of all, statistics demonstrated that a much smaller share of Danish population is using museums’ online sources for other than informational purposes (Bak et al., 2012: p. 74). This raises the question whether Internet-based media is relevant for the audiences of museums as a tool for communication, interaction, and cultural experiences. Moreover, while the statistics report that the most common reason to use museums’ websites was finding practical information about the visit (Ibid.), it is unclear what influence the Internet-based media has on the actual visits.
In this research I assume that there may be different kinds of relationships formed through social media that may influence the visiting behaviour. I seek to identify the forming elements of these relationships that contribute to different kinds of behaviours in order to develop deeper knowledge about the connection between social media use and actual visits. Such questions as whether those who use the Facebook pages of museums are the same people visiting their physical locations or a different group of consumers, how museums can link the online and physical experiences, and whether this connection is desirable for museum audiences, are shaping the research problem of this work.
9 34% of the population has used the websites and online offerings of the museums, exhibitions and culture heritage, data from the survey conducted in 2012. Out of these users 31% used these websites and online media in relation to the upcoming visits (app. 10.5% of the population).
18 Part 2. RESEARCH METHODS
This part explains how I used different research methods as tools to responding to the research question. It presents the steps that realised the research and thus can be replicated to conduct a similar study. This section serves as a manual to the research that can be both read separately and in parallel with the other parts. It allows the reader to understand the methodological decisions taken by the author when developing the survey to study the museum audiences on Facebook, analysing it, and using it for developing new knowledge in museum marketing.
2.1. Research approach
The main goal of this research is to develop knowledge about the audiences of arts and culture museums using social media and to describe how relevant these media are for museum marketing.
In order to choose the research methods suitable for achieving this goal I referred to Crotty (1998), who identifies four core questions to consider: what methods will be used, what methodology governs the choice of these methods, what theoretical perspective lies behind the methodology in question, and what epistemology informs the theoretical perspective (Ibid.: p.2).
I use a pragmatist approach to choosing the research methods, which means that my main choice criteria is to find the most suitable one to answer the research question (Muijs, 2011: p.6). Thus in choosing the philosophical basis for my study I focus on testing whether the chosen method works for answering my research question rather than searching for a definitive truth about the studied ideas and questions (ibid.).
The research question focuses on the relevance of social media for marketing of arts and culture, and the object of studying this question is the users of museum profiles in social media. Providing a comprehensive description and analysis of the users in social media requires a large number of answers from the respondents and the data suitable for statistical analysis. From a pragmatist standpoint, quantitative research can help to answer the research
19 question as it provides an opportunity to describe and analyse large numbers of respondents with a limited availability of resources and collect data in a numerical form. Therefore, I chose to use quantitative methods in order to respond to the research question.
Often quantitative research is seen as a positivist or a realist epistemology. This means that the researcher accepts that there is an objective reality, which can be discovered through the research (Muijs, 2011: pp.3-4). While choosing the quantitative research methods that are based on this belief in objective knowledge, I accept that it is not possible to observe the world without any subjectivity involved in the study. Thus I take the approach of the post- positivist epistemology and instead of seeking an objective truth I choose to test how much I can rely on my findings (Muijs, 2011: p.5). This means that while I develop new knowledge about the studied concepts I also explicitly express the limitations of its applicability.
This research is aimed at explaining how the users of the profiles of museums in social media perceive these profiles and what place this interaction plays in the overall use of social media by these people and their visits to museums. This means that the research problem has an inferential character: my goal is both to describe the phenomenon and explain it (Muijs, 2011: p.6), with the applicability framed by the research limitations. I use an inductive approach to knowledge creation, generalising the results to a larger population than I study through my survey (Hammersley, 2006: p.146). That means that I collect data about a sample reflecting a share of the population that I would like to describe, and then I generalise the results to the general population (Ibid.: p.147).
Quantitative methods are well suited for explaining a phenomenon with statistical methods of analysis, but this choice also brings limitations as opposed to selecting the qualitative methods (Muijs, 2011: p.6). Mujis explains what kinds of limitations are imposed on the collected results by the choice of quantitative methods (Ibid.). While quantitative methods provide the opportunity for breadth of questions and reach, they will not support the research with a deep knowledge of the behaviour and attitudes of social media users. The formulations and variables in the survey are pre-formulated by the researcher, and thus new dimensions explaining the behaviour or opinions of social media users about the profiles of museums will not appear through the use of the survey. These limitations are important for framing the applicability of the results of this study.
20 The research design in this work is based on survey research, which is a flexible method that allows for gathering large numbers of response units and including a variety of research questions and variables (Muijs, 2011: p.8, 38). The units correspond to each unique response to the survey, and variables are the studied characteristics of the respondents (Ibid.: p.8). The survey was also chosen as it suits both for descriptive purposes and for describing relationships between the variables (Ibid.: p.38). Mujis explains that it is easier to generalise from a survey, as it does not include artificial influences on the studied environment (Ibid.: p.39), and this generalisation is necessary for my work as I am researching a sample that represents a small share of the total population.
Survey research is a non-experimental study that has its own disadvantages. The opportunity to control the external influences on the results is not available (Muijs, 2011: p.11). Thus, despite the fact that I define the variables to be studied prior to collecting the data, the results can possibly be influenced by some other non-identified factors. This also makes it more difficult to study causality, and thus in this work I am not analysing the cause-effect relationships between the variables, but only the existence of relationships. While the survey allows for gathering a large amount, the questions are fixed in their length and depth, which does not allow for a deeper study of each question and developing a holistic understanding of the studied processes (Ibid.: p. 39). In order to deal with these disadvantages I focused on identifying the key variables that are expected to have the most influence on the relevance of social media for museum marketing through an analysis of literature.
An invitation to participate in a qualitative interview was included in the survey, but after collecting the data I chose not to organize the interviews. The reason is that the analysis enabled me to group the respondents into five types of users, and to support the research it would have been necessary to interview at least one representative of each type. The respondents available for the interviews did not represent these types, and thus a new research would have been necessary in order to gather enough respondents, which could not be supported by the time and resource limitations.
21 2.2. Research objectives and the need for data
The main goal of this study is to explain how social media is relevant for marketing of arts and culture museums. In order to do that I defined the research objectives that correspond to the sub-questions of the research and guide the process of knowledge creation in this work. Each research objective represents the actions for collecting the information that is necessary to provide a response to the research question. Table 2.1 presents how the need for data corresponds to the research objectives. The research objectives demonstrate that this is a combination of an explorative study of the museum audiences in social media and a study of relationships between motivations, behaviour and other characteristics that occur in a particular real-life context (Muijs, 2011: p.31). These objectives help to describe what information should be collected through the survey (Muijs, 2011: p.33): general information about the respondents, motivations and values involved in following museum pages on Facebook, museum pages followed on Facebook, and visits to museums.
Table 2.1. Research objectives corresponding to the sub-questions of the study Research question: How can museum marketing professionals study the audiences in social media? Research objective Need for data #1: To develop a tool for studying audiences in Testing the validity of all the data collected social media that will support the formulation through the research corresponds to this of marketing strategies of museums research objective #2: To find out if what differentiates the General information about the respondents, followers of museums on Facebook and to motivations and values involved in following divide them into types of relationships museum pages on Facebook #3: To find out whether there is a connection Museum pages followed on Facebook and visits between following museums on social media to museums and visiting them Source: Own production
2.3. Sampling
Quantitative research design requires a defined approach to sampling that will make the study realistic and feasible (Muijs, 2011: p.31). This starts with defining the overall population that I am going to study and the approach to sampling from that population (Ibid.: p.33). In this work I am taking an inductive approach, which means that I will study a share of
22 the population and generalise the findings to the whole population to the extent possible with the limitations of this research.
The population of this study includes all followers of the official museum pages on Facebook. By default, this is a very large population, and in order to be able to study it I needed to choose a much smaller sample. To select a sample I used the convenience sampling method. Although normally it produces less statistically reliable results than probability sampling techniques (Muijs, 2011: p.36), it was the most suitable approach for responding to the research question with the existing limitations. Moreover, the nature of this research limits the access to probability techniques due to the fact that the key characteristics of the general population are scarcely described. Thus convenience sampling was more suitable for one of the main goals of the research, to find out what characterises the people who follow museum pages on Facebook.
In order to increase the reliability of the results I delimited the sample by the geographical location of the museums. I contacted a range of museums located in Copenhagen and Greater Copenhagen area and collaborated with three of them: The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection. These museums are located in Copenhagen and maintain their Facebook pages (Statens museum for kunst [facebook].; Nationalmuseet [facebook].; Davids samling [facebook].) in Danish, which limits the sample mainly to the Danish-speaking respondents.
My goal was to create an unbiased sample that represents the general population (Muijs, 2011: p.36). The location of the museum serves as an approach to reduce bias, as I could distribute the survey to the Facebook users most of whom speak Danish and reside in a close area, and thus can be expected to be familiar with most of the museums mentioned in the study represent different groups of their target audiences. The link to the survey was distributed publicly through the Facebook pages of the three museums, and thus I did not have control over the reach to the followers. This means that not all followers of the museum pages may have seen the survey link, and that the exact number of Facebook users who have seen the link is not available. Nevertheless, I assume that the active followers have seen the link and responded to the survey, and I base my analysis of the results on this assumption.
23 Although the sample is much smaller than the general population, I focused on selecting the key characteristics that can most likely affect the outcomes (Muijs, 2011: p.32) in order to ensure the reliability of the results.
Choosing Facebook for distribution of the survey means leads to several anticipated characteristics of the sample. First, the respondents should normally possess Facebook accounts and use the “follow” functionality of Facebook pages as they receive the survey through pages they follow. Second, the respondents should have some interest in museums and their Facebook pages due to the fact that they receive the survey by following or browsing the Facebook pages of the museums. Third, the respondents must be over 13 years old, as Facebook registration is not offered to younger audiences.
It is important to note that the sample does not aim to include the people who do not follow museum pages on Facebook. This is an intentional choice in order to study the relationships created through Facebook with museum audiences. In order to develop a deeper understanding of museum audiences in social media, Facebook in this case, it is necessary to analyse the existing relationships and their potential effects on the attendance decisions.
2.4. Data collection
The survey developed for this study was implemented through the online software SurveyXact (Rambøll Management Consulting, 1999) provided by Copenhagen Business School. This software allows for generating an open access link to the survey to be distributed to the target audiences of the research. This link was published through the Facebook profiles of museums in order to reach the users who follow arts and culture museums.
An agreement to distribute the survey was established with three museums: The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark and The David Collection. These museums posted the links to the questionnaire on 02.07.2013, 27.06.2013, and 28.06.2013 respectively (Statens museum for kunst [facebook].; Nationalmuseet [facebook].; Davids samling [facebook].). On 19.07.2013 I finalised the collection of the responses and the questionnaires were closed for further collection of responses to avoid mismatch of the data during its extraction.
24 One of the key issues to confront is the occurrence of non-response to the survey (Muijs, 2011: p.36). Due to the nature of distribution through Facebook the information about how many users have actually seen the link is not available, so in case of this survey the non- response cases were only counted once the link was opened. Once the respondents started answering survey, in majority of cases it was completed. The total number of responses is 364, where 311 are fully completed, and 53 are partially completed. The partially completed answers were excluded from the analysis. In order to analyse the collected data I exported the final datasets from SurveyXact to Excel, which enabled me to transfer data to the SPSS data format.
2.5. Survey design
I developed a quantitative survey as a research instrument (Muijs, 2011: p.36) to study how social media can be relevant for museum marketers. This section introduces the process of formulating the statements and the reasoning behind each question. Muijs highlights that planning of the survey is key to ensuring the quality of data collected through the research (Ibid.: p.39). Here I explain how the analysis of existing theories was operationalized to form questions that describe the museum audiences in social media. I also explain how the survey enables knowledge development about the role of social media in museum marketing.
2.5.1. Types of questions
The quantitative survey included both closed and open-ended questions, which means that not all data collected through it is strictly quantitative. A closed question means that the possible answer options are already provided, and the task of the respondent is to choose one or more that appeals to them (Muijs, 2011: pp.39-40). An open-ended question means that the question invites the respondent to type own answer in a provided text field (Ibid.). Moreover, the closed questions included non-numerical data in most questions. To ensure that the questions will be suited for quantitative analysis I pre-coded the answer options, giving each answer a numerical value. The coding approach depends on the types of the question, and the survey included four distinct types.
25 Closed questions with one possible answer (See №1, 2, 7, 9 in Appendix A) presented the respondents with an option to choose one pre-formulated answer to the question. The answers in each case were expressed through text, and thus they were coded as nominal values. Thus numerical values were assigned to each possible answer, but these numbers could not be utilised for any arithmetic actions or comparison.
Closed questions with several possible answers and an open text field for own answer (See №3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 in Appendix A) were coded in a similar way to the previous type, where the ”Other” option was assigned a nominal value as well to indicate the choice of that option. The input for the open answer option was treated as a separate qualitative answer coded as text.
Closed questions with a scale answer option (See №11, 12 in Appendix A) included the following answer options on the scale: ‘Strongly agree’ (5), ‘Agree’ (4), ‘Neither agree nor disagree’ (3), ‘Disagree’ (2), ‘Strongly disagree’ (1), ‘Don’t know’ (0). Ordinal coding means that although the numerical values assigned to the answers could be treated statistically for calculation and comparison, they could not be interpreted as absolute values.
Open-ended questions (See №13, 14 in Appendix A) included personal information about the respondents. Therefore, the information provided by the respondents was manually read and screened for comments that will be included in the research. Nevertheless, only anonymous information provided through these answers was included in the presentation of research results and their analysis. All personalised information, such as names and contact details are not shared through this research in order to secure the privacy of the respondents.
All questions were listed on the same page that gave an overview for the respondents. A short description of the research and the introduction of the author, as well as the language option selection were included in the introduction page that preceded the survey.
2.5.2. Formulation of questions
I developed an approach that builds on the results of literature analysis and enables gathering empirical data about how the social media audiences of cultural organisations feel about the dimensions of cultural experience in social media.
26 During the distribution all questions were placed on one page, but they represented four knowledge areas. Formulation of the questions is based on these areas, and Table 2.2 demonstrates how each question corresponds to the need for information.
Table 2.2. Knowledge areas of the research and corresponding formulation of survey questions General information about the respondents 1. What is your age? 2. What is your gender? 3. Where do you live? 4*. What is your latest completed education? 5*. What is your occupation? 6. What are your leisure interests? Use of Facebook 7. How often do you use Facebook? 8. I use Facebook for… 10. Where do you usually find information about the exhibitions and events at these museums? Museums on Facebook 9.1. Do you follow the page of this museum on Facebook? 11. I use Facebook pages of museums as… 12. Do you agree with the following statements? Museum attendance 9.2. Did you visit the following museums in the past year? Statements in 12. Do you agree with the following statements? Other 13. Contact information for a focus group interview 14. Questions and comments * Due to the limits of time and access to respondents these questions were not studied. Nevertheless, by request from The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) these questions were included in the research distributed through this museum’s Facebook page Source: Own production
2.5.2.1. General information about the respondents
First of all it is necessary to include the general information about the respondents that can describe them from a socio-demographical view. This means asking about age, gender, and other characteristics that describe the respondents objectively. In addition to a general idea about the characteristics of the respondents, these questions help to check if there is a potential asymmetry in the sample.
When asking about the age I based the age groups on the ones used in “The cultural habits of the Danish population” research, which does not include people younger than 15 in the survey for adults (Bak et al., 2012). The question about region of residence was necessary to check
27 whether the respondents actually live within an area that enables then to reach the studied museums easily. In this work I assume that if the respondent lives far away from the museum, than they have an external obstacle to visit that museum, and thus I intentionally chose not to exclude the respondents who live outside Copenhagen and Greater Copenhagen area from the analysis related to museum attendance.
I took leisure interests into consideration to find out whether visits museums play a role in the leisure of the respondents. This question was necessary, because I wanted to find out whether those who follow museums on Facebook are also interested in the actual museum visits.
The main questionnaire did not include the questions regarding the latest completed education and current occupation. Their influence on loyalty is uncertain, and to explain it the study would have had to focus on many different aspects of education and occupation, including family’s social background, income, and many other factors (Bakke, 2009: p. 106). Nevertheless, these questions were included in the research distributed by The National Gallery of Denmark through this museum’s Facebook page (Statens museum for kunst [facebook].).
2.5.2.2. Use of Facebook
Whether or not the respondent is active in using Facebook is important for this study, since it also may impact the use of the museum profiles. This means that if the person rarely uses Facebook, then it is likely that they have less experience of using the museum profiles on this platform. Thus I included a question about how often the respondents use Facebook to make sure that it is relevant to ask them about these pages.
To have a better understanding of the role that museum pages play in the general use of Facebook I included a question that asks about the different goals of using Facebook among the respondents. It was also important to compare the use of Facebook for finding museums with the other sources of similar information to find out whether this platform takes an important share among the information sources about museums.
28 2.5.2.3. Museums on Facebook
Despite the fact that the survey was distributed through Facebook pages of museums it was necessary to ask whether the respondents actually follow these pages, which means that they are subscribed by selecting the “Like” button on the page. This is because through such distribution of the survey it is not possible to control whether the non-subscribers view and answer the survey, and thus it was important to include this question to get more accurate information. Moreover, I included other museums in the list to compare whether those who follow a museum on Facebook tend to follow other museums as well.
Motivations and values for cultural consumption that I applied to social media in the literature review are divided into three main groups of motivations: group or personal identity, art’s intrinsic value, and socialisation. Each of these groups includes values that form these motivations, and I developed the survey questions to reflect these values.
The names of the values require further explanation for the respondents to answer how much they are present for them, and thus I chose to formulate statements that they could evaluate. The advantage of this approach is that it makes it simpler for the respondents to grasp the questions. Nevertheless, the wording of the questions is crucially important, as it could also result in misleading the respondents. Therefore I carefully formulated the statements to reflect the values and then tested them with pilot respondents to make sure that they are easily understood.
The first group of motivations, group or personal identity, focus on the values that reflect the opportunities to demonstrate own personality or connect with a group that shares similar or desired identity. These statements reflected the values: “I use Facebook pages of museums as a way to demonstrate my interests and personality to my network (pages I “like”, what I share and comment)”, “I use Facebook pages of museums as an opportunity to join a community of like-minded people”.
To describe how socialization is motivating the use of museum’s Facebook pages, I asked the respondents about its different aspects in relation to these pages. The statements “I would like to participate in development of museum exhibitions and activities through Facebook (share my opinions or interpretations of objects, select the objects and topics for
29 exhibitions)”, “I would like to have an opportunity to write to curators of exhibitions to share my opinion about different art objects (paintings, sculptures, installations) through Facebook”, and “I use Facebook pages of museums as a good place to share the experiences and opinions with the museum” evaluated whether the respondents are willing to communicate with the museums through their Facebook pages.
In order to find out whether the respondents feel comfortable about sharing their opinion of museums and support the others in doing so, I included the statements “I feel confident to share my opinions on museums' Facebook pages” and “I think that people should share their opinions on museums' Facebook pages only when they have a deep knowledge and understanding of art”. As a way to contrast with the desire to communicate and interact, I asked whether the respondents only use the Facebook pages of museums as an informative source: “I use Facebook pages of museums as only a means to receive information about the exhibitions and events”.
The next group of statements described the application of the intrinsic values of cultural consumption to social media, focusing on captivation, entertainment, and education. The statement “I use Facebook pages of museums as an opportunity to connect to something greater: art, history, culture etc.” was used to find whether the Facebook pages of museums enable the social media users to experience the transcendence of cultural consumption. To find out whether entertainment takes a part in the use of these pages, I included the statement “I use Facebook pages of museums as a pleasure of connecting with the museums that are interesting for me”. The educational aspect of following the museums on Facebook was measured through the statement “I use Facebook pages of museums as a source of knowledge to learn more about an interesting topic”.
2.5.2.4. Museum attendance
One of the goals of this research is to find out whether there is a connection between following the museums on Facebook and visiting them. The information needed in order to reach this goal is the visits to the studied museums, the intentions to visits the museums, and own estimation of how much the act of following a museum on Facebook.
30 To gather the necessary information I included the question “Did you visit the following museums in the past year?” in addition to asking whether the respondents follow these museums on Facebook. To find out about the feelings and motivations evoked by the Facebook pages in relation to visits, I included three statements to evaluate across a scale: “I regularly visit the museums that I follow (like) on Facebook”, “Receiving updates about museums' news on Facebook inspires me to visit them”, and “Receiving updates from museums on Facebook has no influence on my desire to visit them”.
2.5.3. Quality control
To ensure the quality of the questions it is necessary to launch the pilot survey to test the instruments and get feedback before reaching out to the selected sample (Muijs, 2011: p.42). The initial formulations of the statements for the survey were tested with two students, one in English and one in Danish. This was done in order to test the clarity of formulations and the possible pitfalls of the survey questions. After the testing I reformulated some of the statements, and this overview presents the final versions that were used for the survey.
2.6. Data analysis
To analyse the collected data I exported the final datasets from SurveyXact to Excel, which enabled me to transfer data to the SPSS data format. I used the SPSS statistical package (IBM Corp., 2013) provided by the Copenhagen Business School for the statistical analysis of data, and supplemented this analysis with the functionality of Microsoft Excel.
The response rates showed that once the respondents started answering survey, in majority of cases it was completed. Therefore, I did not identify any significant issues with the particular questions and thus I included all of the questions from the survey in the analysis process. The total number of responses is 364, where 311 are fully completed, and 53 are partially completed. The partially completed answers were excluded from the analysis in order to avoid ambiguity and to ensure that the base sample is the same for all analysis. Thus it is possible to compare both the absolute values of the results and the corresponding percentages. The analysis process involved two main analytical activities: identification of patterns and relations among the results and formulation of typology.
31 2.6.1. Identification of patterns among the results
The ‘Descriptives’ and ‘Frequencies’ functions of SPSS provided a general descriptive overview of the variables. These statistical methods are used as tools to uncover possible asymmetry and trends, but I used my own analytical understanding of the problem backed up by the theory of science and literature review to explain the results and uncover potential implications for the museums and their marketing strategy.
2.6.2. Formulation of typology
This research aims to find out what differences among the users of museums’ pages in social media. Therefore, I selected the variables that would determine the grouping and used the functionality of SPSS to divide the respondents according to these groups. Responses to the questions №11 and №12 (see Appendix A) that describe the motivations for following the museum pages served to form the groups of respondents. Notably, the approach I developed corresponds to the analysis approach used by Wallace et al. (2014) for the same purpose – formulation of audience typology based on quantitative research of users on Facebook.
Before grouping the respondents I needed to test whether some of these variables were similar enough to be merged together. This way it could be possible to diminish the number of the variables used for grouping, which was necessary for simplifying the interpretation. Moreover, I needed to test whether these variables had enough statistical significance to be used for grouping. Therefore, I used the “Factor Analysis” functionality of the SPSS software. This analysis enabled me to exclude the variables that lacked enough statistical significance for the analysis and to find out which variables could be grouped together into factors (Janssens, Wijnen, De Pelsmacker, & Van Kenhove, 2008: p. 245). In this case a factor is a new variable that groups several existing variables. Here it is necessary to mention that the grouping of variables into factors also largely depends on the context: I checked whether the groupings produced by the statistical results made sense in context of the research.
Once I selected the groups of valid variables that made sense together I merged them into four corresponding factors. This means that the calculated average of the variables for each response unit served as the value for the factor. Using the SPSS function ‘Reliability Analysis’ I
32 tested these three factors to find out whether they could be reliably used as scales for the grouping. Despite the fact that factor analysis identified four scales, only three of them proved meaningful according to their content and only two were significantly valid in order to be used as scales for further analysis. Thus, I selected two scales and named them ‘personality and connection’ and ‘desire to interact’, to determine the grouping of the respondents. Table 3.3 and lists the statements that were included in the two scales as a result of the factor and reliability analysis.
Table 3.3. Values and motivations of following museums on Facebook included in the two scales
Personality and connection Desire to interact I use Facebook pages of museums as: 1. “I would like to participate in development 1. “An opportunity to join a community of like- of museum exhibitions and activities through minded people”, Facebook (share my opinions or 2. “A pleasure of connecting with the interpretations of objects, select the objects museums that are interesting for me”, and topics for exhibitions)”, 3. “A way to demonstrate my interests and 2. “I would like to have an opportunity to personality to my network (pages I “like”, write to curators of exhibitions to share my what I share and comment)”, opinion about different art objects (paintings, 4. “An opportunity to connect to something sculptures, installations) through Facebook”. greater: art, history, culture etc.”.
Source: primary data from survey “Museums in social media”
To group the respondents I used the ‘Cluster Analysis’ functionality of SPSS. This analysis enables to group the respondents who show most similarity together and form the groups that are significantly different from each other (Janssens et al., 2008: p. 317). In this case, I set the two scales, ‘personality and connection’ and ‘desire to interact’, to define the grouping of the respondents, which resulted in a typology described in section 4.3 of Part 4. Findings.
The supplementary questions were used to create a better definition of the structure of each type and the particular characteristics that bear the highest relevance for the audience members showing these types of relationships.
33 2.7. Validity
Each stage of the analysis involved testing the validity and reliability of the particular procedure in order to make sure that the obtained results are suitable for interpretation. All results presented in this work are tested for statistical significance using the principles described by Janssens et al. in their book “Marketing Research with SPSS” (Janssens et al., 2008).
The survey enabled me to obtain general descriptions of the museums’ Facebook followers and group respondents into five distinct types. I discovered meaningful connections between following museums on Facebook and visiting them, as well as distinct patterns of attitudes and behaviour among the five groups of respondents. Nevertheless, analysis of the results demonstrated that several statements could not be used for analysis.
Moreover, the feedback from respondents expressed through the additional field for comments in the survey pointed out that statements “I use Facebook pages of museums as an opportunity to connect to something greater: art, history, culture etc.” and “I use Facebook pages of museums as a pleasure of connecting with the museums that are interesting for me” did not appear well-formulated to everyone. This means that additional testing with sharpened formulations is needed to explore the influences of other dimensions.
Another element that was lacking is a more precise understanding of the motivations involved in relationship formation. I assumed that the dimensions of the cultural experiences and demographical characteristics are the main determinants of the relationships. Nevertheless, when testing the results and posing a variety of questions to the connections between the variables I found out that in order to explore the relationships to a fuller extent it may be useful to include personal motivations and those determined by the social connections. For example, ‘Enthusiast’ scores highest on involvement with museums, but still it is unclear whether this involvement has to do more with the art itself, the desire of being associated with cultural experiences, influence of close connections, or professional interest.
34 2.8. Summary
This chapter explained all the methodological decisions taken in order to develop knowledge about the relevance of social media for museum marketing strategy. It explains how I approach the research question with the use of two main methods: knowledge development through literature analysis and quantitative research. The first one resulted in formulation of a theoretical framework that informed the development of the survey for gathering empirical data about museum followers on Facebook.
The data collected through the quantitative survey was tested for validity and constantly checked with the goal of maintaining its quality. As a result, I formulated two scales, ‘personality and connection’ and ‘desire to interact’, which enables me to group the respondents using statistical methods. This grouping resulted in formulation of five types of relationships based on motivations for following museum pages on Facebook.
I conducted cross-tabulation and one-way analysis of variance to describe the five types according to the other characteristics included in the survey. As a result, these methods enabled a segmentation and description of the active followers of the three collaborating museums. Finally, it was possible to use cross-tabulation testing also to identify significant relationships between the subscriptions to museums’ pages on Facebook and visits to these museums.
To sum up, the research tools developed and tested in this chapter made it possible to collect the empirical data necessary to answer the research question and to analyse this data for developing an approach to apply the environment of social media to museum marketing. Nevertheless, for further use of this methodology it may be useful to rework the formulations of the statements and include more questions about the social environment, educational and cultural background, and motivations for cultural consumption.
35 Part 3. LITERATURE REVIEW
This part presents the selection of relevant academic literature and its analysis that created a foundation for developing new knowledge about museum audiences in social media. It explains how the academic knowledge about cultural consumption and museum marketing is connected with the social media environment. Through this analysis I formulated a framework of cultural consumption in social media that serves as the basis for the quantitative survey in this research.
The chapter consists of four main parts. First, I explain how I selected the literature for analysis and give an overview of all the works used in the literature review. Then I elaborate on the characteristics of social media that have an important influence on cultural consumption. Taking the argument further I analyse the works that help to describe how museum marketing is influenced by social media. I introduce the notion of relationship marketing that supports the application of marketing principles to social media. An examination of motivations and values involved in arts and culture consumption provide a basis for the framework that describes cultural consumption in social media.
As a result of the literature review, I formulate a framework that brings the cultural consumption into the social media environment and that will be applied practically through the research survey.
3.1. Special characteristics of museum marketing
3.1.1. Goals of museum marketing
To understand how marketing professionals of museums can study the audiences in social media it is necessary to look closer at museum marketing as a discipline and practice. Kotler et al. explain that museum marketing can be seen as an exchange process, where the museum is offering a value to the consumers and in return creates an income for the museum (2008: p. 22). While in some cases this exchange does not generate income from the consumers, for example when the museum offers free entrance, in this work I will not elaborate on the financial structure of this exchange. What is important in this definition by Kotler is that the
36 museum and the consumer are necessarily involved in the process of exchange and that despite the differences in the financing of museums, the museum is offering certain value for its consumers, and this is where museum marketing is focusing its efforts.
Overall goals of museum marketing illustrate what special characteristics supplement the general marketing approaches specifically in this sector. Kotler et al. refer to a citation from M.E.Porter that highlights that museums bring multiple social benefits, and thus their missions cover a variety of goals (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008: p.83). Elaborating on different opinions regarding the main mission of the museum, Kotler et al. demonstrate that despite the existing debate, there is a general settled acceptance that the mission is both to preserve the works and to make them available and intelligible for the publics of the museums (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008: pp.84-85). Museum marketing as a discipline has largely been recognised, and professionals in this field pay high attention to understanding the needs of the consumers and to broaden the variety of experiences that museums offer to their audiences.
While Kotler et al. use the founding elements of marketing mix and marketing strategy that are often found in general marketing literature, McClellan et al. seek to describe the specific challenges faced by the marketing professionals of the cultural organisations (1999). Describing the notion of persistent presence, the authors highlight that one of the key challenges of marketing arts and culture is to maintain the engagement of the audience outside the actual experience (McClellan et al., 1999: p.169-170). McClellan et al. approach the goal of maintaining the continuous engagement of the audiences from the perspective of the physical location of the organisation, the tangible elements of the experience, and the personalities representing it. This article was published in 1999, and therefore it does not deal with the possibility of using social media for talking the specific challenges of arts and culture marketing through social media. Nevertheless, the later work by Kotler et al. emphasized the broad range of opportunities for maintaining engagement with museum audiences through social media (2008: p.33), and I will continue analysing these opportunities of application of museum marketing principles to the environment of social media in this chapter.
37 3.1.2. Experiential nature of the cultural product
To develop an application of museum marketing to social media I chose to analyse the nature of the product or service offered by the museums to their consumers. Arts and culture museums have large differences when it comes to the way they present their product or service (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008: pp.4-6), but in this section I focus on one of the main characteristics that unite the offerings of museums, the experiential nature of their product.
What makes the arts and culture product special is the process of its consumption. Petkus explains that this process is experiential in nature, which means that consumers participate in creating their own versions of the experience (Petkus Jr, 2002: pp.49-50). This means that without the presence of the consumer the cultural experience cannot be delivered. Moreover, this also means that the satisfaction with this process expressed by the consumer depends not only on the organization that provided it, but also on how the consumer participated and engaged with it.
Petkus uses four characteristics to describe the experience of cultural product: entertainment, education, aesthetic, and escapist dimensions (Petkus Jr, 2002: p.51). These characteristics demonstrate how large the variety of the experience is and thus the complexity of the experience and the resulting relationship between the museum and its audiences. It shows how in order to fully receive the experience the consumers will need to engage in entertaining themselves, receiving education, appreciating the aesthetics of the works of art and culture, and immersing into the experience (Ibid.).
Therefore, I identified a two-folded challenge for the museums. The experiential nature of the cultural product makes the engagement of the consumers a top priority for the museum. Yet the kind of product they provide also means that it is a challenge to maintain the engagement outside the actual experience.
Yucelt approaches the cultural experience from the point of view of museum service quality, and this research gives another perspective on the challenge of engaging the audience during and out of the experience (2000). This study explains that many practical aspects, such as the location of the museum, the price, and the quality of guiding materials largely contribute to
38 overall satisfaction (Ibid.: pp.9-11). The contribution of this study to my argumentation is that the holistic view on the process of cultural experience involves both intangible and measurable elements. Therefore, in the application of museum marketing to social media it will be necessary to address these elements in a way that will address their influence on the overall experience.
3.1.3. Motivations for consumption of cultural experiences
Understanding what motivates the consumers to choose arts and culture experiences is necessary for designing a study of museum audiences. It will provide the background for selecting the relevant questions about the use of social media in relation to museums. I address the non-economic motivations that are largely involved in cultural consumption, and elaborate more on socialization as one of them that attracts large interest from researchers and contributes to analyzing museum audiences in social media.
Caves emphasizes that arts and culture do not have the aim of satisfying any pre-existing needs (2002: pp. 2-3). Instead the value is subjectively judged by the audiences, where the resulting impression depends on many characteristics related to the individuals and their desire to perceive that product (Ibid.: pp. 2-3). Currid further develops these ideas and explains that the value or price associated with the arts and culture products are usually unrelated with the resources invested into their production (Currid, 2007: p. 386). Thus both Caves and Currid demonstrate that compared to consumption goods, the products of arts and culture address consumer motivations that are determined by factors outside the economic consideration. Therefore in studying the audiences of arts and culture organisations it is necessary to focus on the motivations that do not relate directly to economic decisions.
Bakke lists three main motivations that bring consumers to various cultural experiences: art’s intrinsic good, people’s social background, and personal or group identity (2009: pp. 104- 106). The first element explains the benefits that cultural consumption brings by providing an opportunity for positive experience through consuming arts and culture (Ibid.: p. 105). Social background plays a role in consumption, and Bakke largely focuses on age and status in explaining this element (Ibid.: p. 106). Finally, expressing personal identity or giving a
39 meaning to groups enables formulation of individual image or belonging to certain groups of people (Ibid.: pp. 107-108).
Further analysis of non-economic motivations shows that the processes of socialization and interaction play an important role for consumption of arts and culture. Currid explains that socialisation contexts play a role in the way culture is produced and distributed and are important for how the consumers perceive value of the cultural product (2007: p. 392). This expands the four dimensions of cultural experience (entertainment, education, aesthetics, and escapism described by Petkus (2002)) by introducing socialisation as another key aspect in value creation.
An in-depth research of cultural experiences in context of life choices and changes provides further insight on what motivations are involved in this kind of consumption (Foreman- Wernet & Dervin, 2011). Foreman-Wernet and Dervin identify eight values of cultural consumption that are listed along with the other frameworks in Table 3.1.
Table 3.1. Four frameworks of motivations and values involved in consumption of arts and culture Factors explaining Four dimensions of Determining value of Categories of art attendance by the arts experience cultural goods by cultural experience Bakke by Petkus Currid by Foreman-Wernet and Dervin Art’s intrinsic good Entertainment Socialization Spirituality and People’s social Education transcendence background Aesthetics Captivation Personal or group Escapism Self-expression identity Self-awareness Cognitive and intellectual growth Community and connection Well-being Social judgement
Source: (Bakke, 2009: p. 104; Currid, 2007: p. 392; Foreman-Wernet & Dervin, 2011: pp. 4-5; Petkus Jr, 2002: p. 51)
40 Taken together, the motivations and values of cultural consumption described by Bakke, Currid, Petkus, and Foreman-Wernet et al. have many similarities, and thus it is possible to combine them together into a holistic framework. I identified four groups that bring them together and that will serve as a theoretical background for supporting the study of museum audiences in social media.
The first group describes the intrinsic benefits of arts and culture. This formulation is based on the art’s intrinsic good described by Bakke (2009: pp. 104-105). According to the description of this factor of arts attendance, it can gather such values and motivations as aesthetics and escapism (Petkus Jr, 2002: p. 51), as well as spirituality, captivation, and well- being (Foreman-Wernet & Dervin, 2011: pp. 4-5). The intrinsic benefits of arts and culture refer to the variety of positive outcomes that are created through choosing to engage in a cultural experience. These include the pleasure of appreciating culture, the opportunity to reflect on something unrelated to daily life, connect to something greater than oneself and feel a spiritual connection.
The second group includes the opportunities for manifestation and development of personal identity. This group takes its origin in one of the factors described by Bakke (2009: pp. 107- 111), but it excludes the group aspect, leaving it for a separate group of socialisation and interaction. It also refers to the self-awareness created by cultural consumption, described as an opportunity to develop a greater understanding of self (Foreman-Wernet & Dervin, 2011: p. 5). While self-expression can be seen as both communication and personal development, I adopt the definition by Foreman-Wernet that emphasises the facilitation of the capacity for self-expression(Ibid.) and thus largely refers to the development of own personality and the abilities to demonstrate it to others.
Education and intellectual development is included in the third group and is based on the education dimension described by Petkus as a process of acquiring and developing new skills and knowledge through cultural consumption (2002: p. 51). It also includes the process of cognitive and intellectual growth that facilitates thinking about the world and development of skills and knowledge as described by Foreman-Wernet and Dervin (2011: p. 5).
41 The motivations of socialisation and interaction are described in the last group. This group is inspired by the detailed elaboration on the role that social influences and interactions play in cultural consumption (Currid, 2007). This importance of communication with other participants of the cultural experience is emphasized by Foreman-Wernet and Dervin, who distinguish the importance of connection to a community and confronting comparisons with others that are created by social judgement (2011: p. 5).
Figure 3.1. Motivations for cultural consumption
Manifestation and Education and development of intellectual personal development identity
Intrinsic bene its of arts Socialisation and interaction and culture Motivations for cultural consumption
Source: Analysis of (Bakke, 2009; Currid, 2007; Foreman-Wernet & Dervin, 2011; Petkus Jr, 2002)
The four groups of motivations illustrated in Figure 3.1. provide a solid theoretical background for applying the knowledge about consumers of arts and culture to the social media environment in the following sections.
3.2. Social media as a marketing tool for arts and culture
This section is aimed at understanding what makes social media environment special and how these characteristics influence marketing decisions. I analysed the works of Benkler and Qualman that elaborate on the nature of online environment and its influence on consumer behaviour (Benkler, 2006; Qualman, 2009). While Parsons provided a corporate perspective
42 on social media use, Waters and Lo gave an understanding of the use of social media for the not-for-profit environment (Parsons, 2011; Waters & Lo, 2012).
To apply the principles of museum marketing in social media I elaborated on the studies by Hausmann, Preece and Johnson, Bertacchini and Morando (2013; 2012; 2011). These works provided examples of applied studies of the social media of museums, and the work by Kelly provided a deep insight into the aspects of museum communication in social media (Kelly, 2013).
3.2.1. The nature of social media marketing as a result of changes in user behaviour
This thesis seeks to explain how social media is relevant for marketing arts and culture museums, and therefore it is necessary to elaborate on the key characteristics of these media and the resulting changes in consumer behaviour. Kotler et al. argue that the accessibility of information about cultural organisations online increased consumer empowerment by providing them with opportunities for more informed choices and optimisation of the value they get from museum visits (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008: p. 34).
The work by Benkler provides valuable insight by explaining how the new technologies and the Internet have a transformational effect on the way people collaborate and connect with each other and organisations (2006). Benkler explains that the web technologies are changing the way culture is produced, consumed and distributed by decentralizing it and involving consumers, or web users, at its core (2006: p. 32). Parsons describes the result of such changes, explaining that social media is taking an increasingly important role in the interactions between companies and consumers (2011: p. 13). Moreover, Parsons argues that presence in social media is necessary and expected and that needs a strategic approach from the communication and marketing professionals (Ibid.). Qualman also highlights that the main result of social media spread for companies is that they need to be actively present and interact, respond, and engage with their online followers (2009).
One of the important aspects of social media environment is the facilitation of community creation. Waters and Lo explain that the openness of organisations in social media overcomes
43 cultural boundaries and contributes to the establishment of communities on a global scale (2012: p. 297). In addition to creating communities, social media has the potential to influence the way people present their own lives and how they act even outside these media.
According to Qualman, the spread of social media has a significant effect on the consumer behaviour, which results in stronger efforts to demonstrate the best aspects of one’s life in those media and the effort to limit the information about negative aspects from spreading through social media (Ibid.). At the same time Qualman argues that social media presents many opportunities to enhance the quality of life and support the social life of the users (Ibid.).
Thus, the empowerment by increased access to information, the creation of global communities and the deep integration into people’s personal life determine the influence of social media on the changes in consumer behaviour. In the next section I will elaborate how user behaviour in social media influences museum marketing online.
3.2.2. Application of museum marketing to social media
A digital revolution, which Kotler et al. describe as a force that extends the cultural experience, makes the museum offering and collections instantly accessible on an international scale(2008: p.33). While they emphasize the important influence of digital media on cultural consumption and the integration of e-mailing techniques in museum marketing, social media does not attract large focus of that work (Ibid.). Nevertheless, innovation in social media offers many new opportunities to cultural organisations that can help them reach their goals. These are opportunities for enhanced audience reach, art form development, creation of additional value, and development of new business models (Bakhshi & Throsby, 2012: pp. 208-212). Thus I referred to other works to understand how museums can seize these opportunities and develop marketing strategies that integrate social media.
Hausmann developed a practical framework for museums aimed at encouraging word-of- mouth marketing in social media (2012). This framework focuses on the actions that museums need to undertake to engage their audiences on the web: to ensure the technological accessibility, to provide regular valuable content, to encourage communication
44 (Ibid.: p. 37). This approach resonates with the notion of persistent presence discussed by McClellan: by maintaining constant updated information about the organisation in available channels it is possible to keep the interest of the audiences outside the actual consumption experience (2003).
Both Hausmann and McClellan touch the connection between the presence of the cultural organization in media and the actual visits to them. Bertacchini and Morando argue that online media has the potential of increasing the value of the actual museum collections through supplementing it by the online experience (2013: p. 70). Moreover, these authors explain that the digital media of museums has low substitution or even complimentary effect on the physical visits to museums (2013: p. 68).
Research of museums in Australia in 2010 found that audiences are willing to interact with museums in a two-way communication that involves both sides (Kelly, 2013: p. 54). Kelly proposes to examine social media as platforms for providing and developing this two-way communication between museums and their audiences (Ibid.). She explains that the ways that social media is transforming the practices of museums go much further beyond the marketing communication strategy. This means that the role of new technologies and social media also affects the organisational structure of museums and requires the museum professionals to constantly develop their skills and knowledge in the digital sphere (Kelly, 2013: pp. 66-67). Thus, the influence of social media touches the core of the museums and their processes of interactions with the audiences.
The work by Kelly demonstrates that to embrace the digital and social media museums need to bring the audiences into their centre through two-way communication. In my research I analyse the motivations that drive the social media users to follow and interact with museums in these media, and the central role of the audiences in museum communication also means that a deeper understanding of motivations of cultural consumers in social media can provide practical insight for the marketing strategies of museums.
To sum up, the increasingly important role that social media is taking in the lives of individuals and its central role in delivering the museum offerings provide opportunities for
45 museums to add value for their consumers by engaging them in two-way communication through social media.
3.3. Relationship marketing linking the museum and its audiences in social media
Kotler et al. argue that the transformation of the single exchanges between the museum and the consumer into long-lasting relationships are the foundation for the success and effectiveness of museum marketing (2008: p.24-25). These single exchanges mainly describe the museum visits in this case, but it is possible to extend them to including the interactions with the museum online, and especially in social media. As the previous sections have demonstrated, social media have a large potential for building long-lasting relationship with consumers, and thus these online exchanges can be analysed together with museum visits.
Relationship marketing is a discipline that Kotler et al. integrate into the holistic museum marketing concept, and it plays a large role in establishing and maintaining the interactions with the consumers (2008: p. 26). They emphasize that relationship marketing is aimed at creating long-term support for the museum by creating lasting relationships with all stakeholders, such as staff and board of directors, members, donors, the surrounding community, visitors, and the prospective consumers (Ibid.). Although this research is focusing on studying existing consumers in social media, this view helps to link museum visitors and the social media users through the notions of relationship marketing.
The definition of relationship marketing developed by Ravald and Grönroos focuses on added value that the relationship brings to the customers (1996). Egan cites the following definition of formulated by Grönroos, where the objectives of relationship marketing are: ”to identify and establish, maintain and enhance and, when necessary, terminate relationships with customers and other stakeholders, at a profit so that the objectives of all parties are met; and this is done by mutual exchange and fulfilment of promises” (2011: p. 38). Ravald and Grönroos see value of relationship marketing as the connection between perceived benefit and sacrifice of purchasing a product, and explain that establishment of consumer relationships can increase this value (1996: pp. 21-25).
46 Egan argues that loyalty is at the core of relationship marketing and differentiates different definitions of loyalty (2011: p. 56). This author deduces an approach to understanding loyalty as a complex state of mind that describes a high level of relationship between the consumer and the brand or product, which goes beyond the measurements of purchasing behaviour to touching more subtle emotional factors (Ibid.). To describe these emotional factors Egan illustrates attitudinal and behavioural loyalty (2011: p. 57). While the behavioural approach is based on the number of purchases and brand switching, the attitudinal approach refers to consumer preferences and dispositions for describing loyalty (Ibid.). These two kinds of loyalty that form the core of relationship marketing strategy give an insight for this study by defining the two areas that are to be investigated. This means that by studying both the aspects of behaviour and attitudes towards museums online it will be possible to provide insights for relationship-building practices in museum marketing.
The way Preece and Johnson apply relationship marketing to arts and culture supplements the knowledge about its role in creating long-lasting relationships with the consumers (2011). These authors explain that the practices of relationship marketing provide opportunities for sustaining interest and connection with the audiences outside the actual experience (Ibid.: pp. 21-22). Nevertheless, the traditional relationship marketing practices, such as advertising through direct mail, individual services, management of databases, and marketing research, are also time- and resource intensive (Ibid.: p.22).
Elaborating on loyalty, one of the key elements of relationship marketing, Guillon studied its different manifestations among the audiences of cultural experiences, and formulated a corresponding segmentation (2011). The main implication of that work is that the approach to measuring consumer loyalty should be tied to the specific goals of the organisation, be it raising income from ticket sales or encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations. This means that in studying consumer loyalty toward museums it is also important to consider what the goals are in terms of maintaining loyalty. As many museums are performing on a not-for-profit basis, such as the three collaborating museums, the key parameters of evaluating loyalty according to Guillon can be the likelihood of recommending the experience to social network and serve as key influencers in selecting cultural experiences offered by the museums (2011: p. 41).
47 In the examination of the relationships developed in social media between organisations and their consumers, Sashi emphasizes the importance of networks that allow the consumers to co-create their own experience and to engage in discussing problems and developing solutions together with the organisations (2012: pp. 254-255). This research contributes to the discussed applications of relationship marketing to social media by explaining that consumer engagement is a cycle, where the same consumer can move from one level of engagement to another. This means that the relations are not definitive, but an evolving process: starting with initial connection and sometimes proceeding to interaction, satisfaction, retention, commitment, advocacy, and engagement (Ibid.: p. 261).
The low-cost opportunities that social media provides for enhancing the two-way communication with the audiences (Hausmann, 2012: p. 32), coupled with the crucial importance of being present and active in these media (Kelly, 2013), make it an affordable and promising resource for building strong relationships with museum audiences.
3.3.1. Audience studies reflecting the values and motivations
In this thesis I develop an approach to studying the audiences of arts and culture museums. I referred to the academic literature that elaborates on different ways to study the consumers of arts and culture for facilitating the decision-making of marketing professionals, and the works by Nantel and Kotler et al. provide the necessary theoretical background for formulating my study approach (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008; Nantel, 2001).
Marketing research, as defined by Kotler et al., is “systematic design, collection, analysis, and reporting of data and findings relevant to understanding market forces better and improving consumer satisfaction and organizational performance” (2008: p. 249). In this work the goal is to understand how social media can be relevant for museum marketing through gathering and analysing data about the existing users of museums’ Facebook pages.
Segmentation is an approach to study consumer behaviour through grouping them according to similarities in motivations and individual variables (Nantel, 2001: pp. 82-88). A very recent work by Wallace et al. presents a research, which segmented Facebook audiences of brands based on a quantitative research (Wallace et al., 2014). This work used the same statistical
48 analysis techniques as this research (see Part 2. Research Methods), and resulted in a typology of brand followers on Facebook.
Wallace et al. emphasize that few, if any, research has studied why consumers follow the pages of companies or organisations on Facebook (2014: p. 92). Through the use of literature on branding, these authors constructed a framework of characteristics for an exploratory fan typology that included the reasons for liking a brand, the structure of consumer’s Facebook network, and personality traits (Ibid.: pp. 95-96). While this approach places a focus on the aspects of the consumer’s personality and social connections, the framework for segmenting culture audiences developed in this work is centred around motivations and values as possible reasons for following museums on Facebook.
Finally, the typology developed by Wallace et al. described four types of users following brands on Facebook: ‘Fan’-atics’, ‘Utilitarians’, ‘Self-Expressives’, and ‘Authentics’ (2014: pp. 99-102). ‘Fan’-atics’ are the users that are highly engaged with the brands both online and offline, actively support the brands by word-of-mouth (WOM), and are primarily female (Ibid. p: 99). ‘Utilitarians’ do not have an emotional connection with brands, which they like in order to get incentives; the brand itself plays little role in constructing their online identities, and this group shares least WOM; the majority of this group are male respondents (Ibid.: pp. 100-101). ‘Self-Expressives’ offer the most WOM to brands and their main goal of liking brands is to impress others; this group actively uses brands for creating a desired social image on Facebook, and is mainly formed by male respondents (Ibid.: pp. 101-102). The last type, ‘Authentics’, is not concerned with the image that their ‘likes’ convey on Facebook, but genuinely likes the brands they follow and offer WOM to support them; this group consists of relatively older female respondents.
While the typology of brand followers on Facebook does not touch upon many of the characteristics that are important for studying consumption of arts and culture, it is a good reference for comparing the approach of this research with similar studies. I will discuss the results of the typology developed in this work in comparison with the typology developed by Wallace et al. (2014) in Part 5. Discussion.
49 3.4. Framework of loyalty in application of relationship marketing to museums
In this chapter I analysed the motivations and values involved in cultural consumption and the characteristics of social media use. Therefore, it is possible to combine this theoretical knowledge into a framework that will be used to gather empirical data about museum audiences in social media and develop a segmentation of these audiences.
The literature review demonstrated that the practices of relationship marketing have the potential to connect the experience of a museum visit and the interaction with museum pages in social media. Through an analysis of theories of relationship marketing I identified that behaviour and attitude are key factors in forming the consumer loyalty, which is one of the main goals of relationship marketing. Thus in forming the theoretical research framework I choose to address the audiences in social media through these two elements.
Figure 3.2. Framework of loyalty in application of relationship marketing to museums
• Motivations and values involved in arts and culture Attitude consumption
• Use of social media Behavior • Use of the museum pro iles in social media • Visits to museums
Sources: Literature analysis
Figure 3.2 illustrates the framework, where attitude gathers all the intangible factors, such as motivations and values involved in arts and culture consumption, and behaviour gathers the measurable elements referring to the use of social media and museum profiles in social media, and the museum attendance. This framework is the result of the overall literature review that serves as a basis for formulating the research survey to gather empirical data.
50 3.5. Summary
Literature review demonstrated that social media has a high relevance for marketing of arts and culture. I evaluated this relevance gradually by combining the characteristics of arts and culture product, social media environment, and relationship marketing. Their combination demonstrated that through the practices of relationship marketing cultural organisations can enhance their long-term bonds with their audiences and connect the online representations of museums with the experiences of actual visits.
Motivations for cultural consumption are not determined by economic value of the cultural product. Instead, it is a complex combination of motivations that touch the audiences personally, enhance their well-being, and offer opportunities for social connections. Comparison of these motivations with the environment of social media demonstrated that the social and interactive nature of these online tools appeals to many motivations of cultural consumption. Therefore, social media provides new opportunities for broadening the audience reach and maintaining presence outside the actual experiences.
An approach that is often used to studying the audiences on a large scale is segmentation and this chapter provided a theoretical basis for choosing the characteristics of values and motivations of cultural consumption for describing the followers of museums’ pages on Facebook and developing a typology of these users.
The result of the literature review is a framework that integrates tangible and intangible aspects of loyalty in relationship marketing. This framework integrates the motivations for cultural consumption and the characteristics of social media use that together form a theoretical foundation for studying the museum audiences in social media through a quantitative survey and applying the results to museum marketing strategy development.
51 Part 4. FINDINGS
This chapter presents the results of the quantitative survey of museum audiences on Facebook. The questionnaire was distributed by three museums: The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection through their profiles on Facebook and gathered responses from 311 users of this social media platform.
First, I describe the respondents from a socio-demographical point of view to give a general presentation of the sample. Then I compare the behaviour of the respondents in relation to following museums on Facebook and visiting them. The description of five relationship types created between the museums and their followers in the environment of Facebook finalises the presentation of the results.
4.1. Characteristics of museum audiences on Facebook
This is a general overview of selected demographical and social characteristics of the respondents who answered to the questionnaire. I assume that this overview describes the profiles of those who actively read the posts of museums and engage with them, since they read the announcement about the survey and replied to it. This section presents the results about the demographic characteristics of the respondents, how they use Facebook, the main sources of information about museums, and their leisure interests.
4.1.1. Demographic characteristics
The questions about general demographical characteristics included age, gender, and the region of residence. These characteristics give a general overview of the sample, and I supplement it with a deeper analysis of the Facebook followers of the three studied museums.
Table 4.1 includes the demographic information about all respondents and also allows comparing these characteristics with the followers of each museum among the respondents. Some follow several museums or do not follow any of them, and thus in this table the absolute numbers of the followers in each row does not sum up to the absolute number of all respondents. Therefore, I describe the results based on the share count expressed by
52 percentage to identify the trends in this dataset. Further in this chapter I will elaborate more on the differences among the followers of the three museums.
Table 4.1. Demographical characteristics of the respondents All The National The National The David
respondents Gallery Museum Collection 15-19 9 3% 6 4% 4 2% 0 0% 20-29 91 29% 52 31% 53 27% 7 23% 30-49 129 41% 73 43% 86 43% 13 42% 50+ 82 26% 39 23% 55 28% 11 35% Gender Female 231 74% 132 78% 148 75% 19 61% Male 80 26% 38 22% 50 25% 12 39% Region Copenhagen or Greater 199 64% 125 74% 121 61% 27 87% Copenhagen Area Zealand 28 9% 12 7% 21 11% 2 6% Other region in Denmark 63 20% 27 16% 46 23% 0 0% Other country 21 7% 6 4% 10 5% 2 6% Total 311 100% 170 100% 198 100% 31 100% Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Results demonstrate that different age groups are not equally distributed among the respondents. The most represented age group is 30-49 years old, and the groups of 20-29 and over 50 years old are rather similar in size. The younger audiences aged 15-19 years are represented significantly less than any other group. Nevertheless, it is also observable that the distribution of age groups is similar among all of the studied museums and the entire sample.
Female respondents dominate the results significantly: 74% female respondents compared to 26% male respondents. The same age distribution is observed among the followers of The National Gallery and The National Museum. Nevertheless, the gender is more equally distributed among the followers of The David Collection.
Another difference in data between the three museums is observed in the regional distribution of the followers. Table 4.1 shows that while The National Gallery and The National Museum attract significant following from across Denmark, the followers of the page of The David Collection are concentrated in Copenhagen and Greater Copenhagen area. Respondents from other countries also answered the survey, but these answers represent a small share of all answers, which accounts for 7%. The majority of respondents from other
53 countries live in the Nordic region: Sweden, Iceland, and Norway account for 52% of the other countries in the study (see Table B.1 in Appendix B).
In many situations the youngest group, where respondents are aged 15-19 years, performs in a different way from the rest. For example, in each age group there are significantly more women than men who responded to the survey, except for the youngest one (see Table 4.2). This age group has an equal distribution of gender, which stands out, since in all other groups the distribution of gender reflects the total distribution.
Table 4.2. Distribution of gender among age groups Female Male Total 15-19 4 44% 5 56% 9
20-29 75 82% 16 18% 91 Age 30-49 97 75% 32 25% 129
50+ 55 67% 27 33% 82
Total 231 74% 80 26% 311 100% Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
4.1.2. Facebook use by the respondents
Almost all respondents use Facebook every day and only few use it 1-2 times a week (see Table B.2 in Appendix B). Therefore, it is possible to say that all of the respondents are active users of Facebook, which was anticipated due to the fact that the survey was distributed through Facebook pages of museums.
The leading purpose of using Facebook among the respondents is private communication: interactions with family, friends, and other close social connections. Finding arts exhibitions and other cultural activities in one’s area is the purpose of about half of the respondents in each age group and in total. Sharing daily experiences and reading news occupy similar position, where half of the respondents chose these activities as purposes of using Facebook. See Table B.3 in Appendix B for the detailed results on overall Facebook use by the respondents.
When comparing the use of Facebook among different age groups in Table 4.3 I identified that main differences are related to finding cultural experiences in one’s area and sharing daily experiences. The youngest group uses Facebook less than other groups for these two
54 purposes, while the results for other ways of using Facebook are rather similar among the age groups and correspond to the general sample (see Table B.4 in Appendix for all results).
Table 4.3. Use of Facebook according to age groups
Age
Use of Facebook 15-19 20-29 30-49 50+ Finding art exhibitions and other cultural activities 0 0% 50 55% 58 45% 44 54% (concerts, festivals etc.) in my area To share my daily experiences (through photographs, 3 33% 37 41% 65 50% 47 57% video, text) on my Facebook page Total number of respondents in the age group 9 91 129 82 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
4.1.3. Finding information about museums
Different kinds of media and communication compete for serving as a resource of information about the available arts and culture experiences. The main focus of this work is the environment of Facebook, and thus I compare it with the other competing sources of information about exhibitions and events in museums.
Results demonstrated that the respondents are actively using Facebook for getting information about exhibitions and events in museums. Comparison with other communication tools demonstrates that official websites of museums attract as much attention as their Facebook pages. Nevertheless, other social networks, such as Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, do not seem to play a significant informational role for the respondents. Around half of the respondents are also subscribed to the e-mail newsletters of the museums. A similar share of them reads the articles and reviews about museums in online and printed press.
The third most important source of information is family and friends, which means that these are word-of-mouth recommendations and feedback about the different museum experiences. ‘Other’ responses included different informational websites that provide information about activities in the city (11 answers; 4%), such as Aok.dk, Ibyen.dk, Kunsten.nu.
55 Table 4.4. Sources of information about museums for all respondents and followers of the three museums All The National The National The David Source of information respondents Gallery Museum Collection Official websites of museums 248 80% 132 77,6 159 80,3 25 80,6 Facebook 242 78% 142 83,5 163 82,3 25 80,6 Family and friends 169 54% 99 58,2 103 52,0 16 51,6 Articles and reviews in online 91 53,5 87 43,9 18 58,1 149 48% or printed press Email newsletters by the 83 48,8 89 44,9 19 61,3 132 42% museums Other social networks 27 9% 20 11,8 15 7,6 3 9,7 Total 311 170 198 31 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
While Facebook is actively used as an information source about museums by all age groups, there is an observable difference in priorities between the youngest age group and the other ones. Respondents aged 15-19 years use the recommendations from family and friends than the other groups, and use the official websites of museums and reviews much less (see Table 4.5. for these data, Table B.5 and Table B.6 in Appendix B for all results).
Table 4.5. Sources of information about museums across age groups
Source of information 15-19 20-29 30-49 50+ Facebook 7 78% 83 91% 95 74% 57 70% Official websites of museums 5 56% 77 85% 107 83% 59 72% Family and friends 7 78% 61 67% 63 49% 38 46% Email newsletters by the museums 0 0% 37 41% 56 43% 39 48% Articles and reviews in online or printed 3 33% 47 52% 61 47% 38 46% press Total number of respondents in the 9 91 129 82 age group Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
4.1.4. Leisure interests
For a better understanding of museums’ Facebook audiences I included a question about the leisure interests of the respondents. It gives an opportunity to compare visits to museums with other leisure activities to see what role they play in the free time of the Facebook audiences. Thus it is important to note that for this sample the most popular leisure interest is
56 going to exhibitions in museums and galleries. Each of the other types of interests took a significant share, but smaller than museum visits (see Table B.7 in Appendix B).
Among ‘Other’ interests added by the respondents the most common were related to nature and pets, own arts practice (e.g. painting, singing, dancing), crafts, collections, and socialising. Taking into account that the museums that distributed the survey are dedicated to arts, national history and culture, these interests correspond to the nature of experiences offered by the studied museums
As with the previously described characteristics, the main difference among the age groups is between the youngest group aged 15-19 years and the other age groups taken together. Visits to museums and galleries are less popular among the youngest respondents, while they take the largest share for all other ages. At the same time, the youngest group prioritizes watching films, going out in the city, and doing sport more than the others (see Table 4.6).
Table 4.6. Leisure interests according to age groups Types of leisure interests 15-19 20-29 30-49 50+ Going to exhibitions in museums and 4 44% 82 90% 110 85% 67 82% galleries Reading books 5 56% 69 76% 97 75% 64 78% Music (listening, going to music concerts) 6 67% 62 68% 71 55% 50 61% Watching films 7 78% 58 64% 83 64% 33 40% Going out in the city (cafes, restaurants, 6 67% 57 63% 71 55% 25 31% bars, clubs) Sport 6 67% 39 43% 53 41% 21 26% Total number of respondents in the 9 91 129 82 age group Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
4.2. Comparison of visits to museums and subscriptions to their the Facebook pages
To find out whether museum visitors are also active followers of their pages on Facebook I analysed the actual visits to museums and the subscriptions to their pages. The analysis centred on the three museums, The National Gallery, The National Museum, and The David Collection, indicates a connection between the two characteristics.
57 I assume that the further the respondents live from a certain museum, the less opportunities they have to visit these museums. Most reside in Copenhagen and Greater Copenhagen area, and only they are considered in this section in order to remove the geographical barriers from consideration. Therefore, all analysis related to the visits to museums includes 199 respondents out of 311 completed answers. Among the residents of Copenhagen or Greater Copenhagen area 125 follow The National Gallery, 121 follow The National Museum, and 27 follow The David Collection.
4.2.1. Respondents who follow museums on Facebook
First, I analysed the results regarding the subscriptions to museums’ pages on Facebook. Over half of all respondents follow The National Gallery and The National Museum on Facebook, and less follow The David Collection. This difference reflects the fact that the absolute number of Facebook users who follow the first two museums is significantly larger, and thus most of the responses come from the followers of these two museums. Therefore this difference reflects the absolute number of users following the Facebook pages of the three museums, but does not necessarily illustrate the level of audience engagement with these museums on this social media platform.
Results in the Table 4.7 show that most of the museum followers live in areas that are close to these museums. Moreover, it indicates that the youngest age group is more active in following The National Gallery, while for other age groups the results are rather similar.
Table 4.7. Facebook followers of the three studied museums: all respondents and the respondents that reside in Copenhagen or Greater Copenhagen area The National The National The David Total Gallery Museum Collection All respondents 170 55% 198 64% 31 10% 311 All 125 63% 121 61% 27 14% 199 Copenhagen 15-19 years old 4 67% 2 33% 0 0% 6 or Greater 20-29 years old 45 67% 37 55% 7 10% 67 Copenhagen area 30-49 years old 55 60% 58 64% 11 12% 91 50+ 21 60% 24 69% 9 26% 35 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
58 The results in Table 4.8 describe the absolute number of followers of each museum. This means that the number of followers cannot be summated, since some of the respondents follow several museums and others do not follow any. The questionnaire included other museums in addition to the three studied museums in order to find out whether those who follow these museums also tend to follow other museums on Facebook. Table 4.8 shows that the followers of the three museums tend to also follow other museums on Facebook.
Table 4.8. Comparison of subscriptions to museums’ Facebook pages The National The National The David Museums Gallery Museum Collection The National Gallery of Denmark x x 66 53% 19 15% The National Museum of Denmark 66 55% x x 19 16% The David Collection 19 70% 19 70% x x Louisiana 87 86% 52 51% 18 18% Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 51 80% 52 81% 19 30% Arken 40 87% 29 63% 12 26% Ordrupgaard 22 88% 16 64% 12 48% Hirschsprung Collection 16 70% 18 78% 12 52% The Natural History Museum of Denmark 27 73% 28 76% 11 30% Other art galleries and museums 88 79% 65 59% 18 16% Other history museums 53 62% 75 88% 17 20% Other museums dedicated to nature and 24 63% 27 71% 8 21% environment (for example, Aquarium) Total number of respondents 125 121 27 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Moreover, Table 4.8 demonstrates that there is a tendency to follow museums that are dedicated to similar topics. For example, the followers of The National Gallery also actively follow other arts museums, and the followers of The National Museum are more active in following other history museums and those dedicated to nature and environment.
4.2.2. Visits to museums
The results regarding visiting the three studied museums are rather similar to the results on following museums in terms of their distribution: more that a half of the respondents visited The National Gallery and The National Museum within the past year (see table 4.9). Fewer respondents visited The David Collection, but these results also reflect the absolute number of the followers of this Facebook page.
59 Those respondents who live in Copenhagen or Greater Copenhagen area are more active in visiting the museums than those who live further, which corresponds to the research assumption. The results also show that although the visits are rather similarly distributed in terms of age among the museums, the youngest groups stands out: most of them visited The National Gallery in the past year.
Table 4.9. Visits to the three studied museums: all respondents and the respondents that reside in Copenhagen or Greater Copenhagen area
The National The National The David Total Gallery Museum Collection All respondents 173 56% 175 56% 55 18% 311 All 135 68% 125 63% 43 22% 199 Copenhagen 15-19 years old 5 83% 4 67% 0 0% 6 or Greater 20-29 years old 46 69% 40 60% 18 27% 67 Copenhagen area 30-49 years old 60 66% 59 65% 15 16% 91 50+ 24 69% 22 63% 10 29% 35 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Table 4.10 shows a tendency: respondents who visit the three studied museums also tend to visit other museums.
Table 4.10. Comparison of visits to museums The National The National The David Museums Gallery Museum Collection The National Gallery of Denmark x x 83 66% 36 84% The National Museum of Denmark 83 61% x x 29 67% The David Collection 36 27% 29 23% x x Louisiana 92 68% 62 50% 27 63% Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 80 59% 72 58% 29 67% Arken 51 38% 31 25% 18 42% Ordrupgaard 31 23% 22 18% 15 35% Hirschsprung Collection 28 21% 20 16% 17 40% The Natural History Museum of Denmark 69 51% 69 55% 25 58% Other art galleries and museums 97 72% 83 66% 34 79% Other history museums 64 47% 78 62% 27 63% Other museums dedicated to nature and 38 28% 46 37% 15 35% environment (for example, Aquarium) Total number of respondents 135 125 43 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Compared to Table 4.8, which shows an inclination to follow similar museums on Facebook, Table 4.10 shows that a particular trend among visits is less clear, since the visitors of art
60 museums also tend to actively visit museums of cultural history and vice versa. Therefore, it is not possible to say whether the type of museum has an influence of the visiting choices among the respondents.
4.2.3. Relationship between visits and Facebook subscriptions
Comparison of the subscriptions to museums’ Facebook pages and the actual visiting behaviour demonstrated a positive relation between the two. Respondents who followed the museums on Facebook were also actively visiting them in the past year, and those who did not follow a museum on Facebook mostly did not visit it either. Nevertheless, the causality in this relationship could not be inferred from the results: it is not possible to state whether the visits led to following the museums on Facebook or whether the action of following the museum led to the visits.
Table 4.11. Connection between following museums and visiting them Followers of The National Gallery 1-2 times 70 56% 3 or more times 40 32% All visits 110 88% Total number of 125 100% followers Followers of The National Museum 1-2 times 56 46% 3 or more times 44 36% All visits 100 83% Total number of 121 100% followers Followers of The David Collection 1-2 times 11 41% 3 or more times 9 33% All visits 20 74% Total number of 27 100% followers Total number of respondents residing in Copenhagen and Greater Copenhagen area: 199 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Table 4.11 shows that for each of the three museums around 80% of the respondents both followed that museum and visited it in the past year. It also shows that especially for the first
61 two museums approximately half of the followers are very active in visiting the museums: they attended the exhibitions or events three or more times during the past year.
4.3. Five types of relationships
One of the key results of this study is the typology of relationships created between museums and their audiences through Facebook. A typology means that the general sample of respondents was divided into groups that reflect different motivations and values involved in following a museum on Facebook. Through statistical analysis I minimized the original variety of values and motivations and defined two scales: ‘Personality and connection’ and ‘Desire to interact’ (see Part 2. Research Methods for detailed explanation of research approach).
The scale ‘Personality and connection’ scale integrates aspects of feeling connected with the environment of the museum pages, being part of a community with shared interests, and demonstrating own personality to others. This scale also represents more abstract values of well-being and connection to a greater concept (e.g. art, history, or culture).
The scale ‘Desire to interact’ expresses the willingness to communicate, to share own opinions, and to contribute to the curatorial decisions of museums through their Facebook. While ‘Desire to interact’ describes the willingness to be an active participant in the dialogue with the museum through Facebook, ‘Personality and connection’ integrates the feelings and values that create an emotional connection with the museum, but do not necessarily lead to active participation and interaction with it.
By using the two scales I defined five types of relationships: ‘Enthusiast’, ‘Connected’, ‘Contributor’, ‘Interested’, and ‘Informational’. Figure 4.1 shows the values for the two scales, ‘Personality and connection’ and ‘Desire to interact’ and illustrates the differences of their motivational structures.
The first type has the highest values for both scales, where the values lie close to “4”, meaning that the respondents mostly selected the answer “agree” in relation to the statements that describe them as feeling emotionally connected with the museums and willing to interact with them on Facebook. The title ‘Enthusiast’ highlights the high involvement of the first group and points out to the strong representation of the two motivations. The second group shows a
62 high level of involvement of personality and connection with the museums on Facebook, but does not express a strong desire to interact. Therefore, the title of this type is ‘Connected’, which highlights the emotional attachment to the museums. The third type has an opposite distribution of values than the second one, and its strong desire to interact is expressed through the title ‘Contributor’. It is important to note that the emotional connection with the museum is still moderately represented in the third type. The title ‘Interested’ expresses the neutrality of the fourth type, and ‘Informational’ describes the last one, where the emotional connection and desire to interact with the museums is very low.
Figure 4.1. Relationship types: values* according to the two scales, ‘Personality and connection’ and ‘Desire to interact’
5 4.03 4.24 3.48 3.36 4 3.10 2.90 3 1.89 2.22 1.50 2 0.98 1 0 Enthusiast Connected Contributor Interested Informational Relationship type
Personality and connection Desire to interact
Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
* The values on the y-axis correspond to the following answer options: 5 – ‘Strongly agree’, 4 – ‘Agree’, 3 – ‘Neither agree nor disagree’, 2 – ‘Disagree’, 1 – ‘Strongly disagree’, 0 – ‘Don’t know’.
The types are not equal in size, and Figure 4.2 demonstrates the absolute number of respondents in each type and their share in the whole sample (311 completed answers). This figure also places the types in a matrix to illustrate their differences in terms of the two motivational scales. It shows that the largest type, ‘Enthusiast’, takes the highest position across both motivations, and expresses the relative placement of the other types. The most neutral type, ‘Interested’, is placed in the middle, while the other three types, ‘Connected’, ’Contributor’, and ‘Informational’, take the positions that best represent the results across the two scales.
63 Figure 4.2. Five types of relationships between museums and their followers on Facebook
HIGH
CONNECTED ENTHUSIAST 75 | 24% 97 | 31%
INTERESTED 63 | 20%
Personality and connection Personality INFORMATIONAL CONTRIBUTOR 28 | 9% 48 | 15%
LOW Desire to interact HIGH
Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
To get a deeper understanding of the five types I analysed how other characteristics of respondents are distributed across the types. Notably, none of the demographical characteristics (e.g. age, gender, region of residence) showed significant difference in distribution. This means that the motivations and values of following a Facebook page described through the two scales are not directly related to the demographical characteristics of the respondents.
In addition to demographical characteristics, I analysed the characteristics of behaviour and preferences of the respondents that were included in the survey. Table 4.12 presents the results for the two characteristics that proved to be statistically valid: following other history museums on Facebook and reading articles and reviews in online or printed press to find information about exhibitions and events in the museums. It is notable that ‘Enthusiast’ is more active in following other history museums than the other types, which highlights the active involvement of this type with museums on Facebook. Moreover, ‘Enthusiast’,
64 ‘Connected’, and ‘Interested’ are more active in reading articles and reviews about the museums.
Table 4.12. Relationship types: other characteristics Characteristic Enthusiast Connected Contributor Interested Informational I follow other history 56 18% 29 9% 21 7% 20 6% 14 5% museums on Facebook I read articles and reviews in online or printed press 39 13% 43 14% 19 6% 37 12% 11 4% to find information about museums Total number of completed answers: 311 Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Other characteristics tested in the research did not have a significant difference among the types, which means that they do not have a strong connection with the motivations and values of emotional connection and desire to interact with the museums on Facebook.
I also tested how other values and motivations of the respondents can describe the differences among the five types, and these results are presented in Table 4.13.
Table 4.13. Characteristics of the relationship types: other values and motivations
Characteristic Interested Connected Enthusiast Contributor Informational I use Facebook pages of museums as a source of knowledge 3,2 2,3 2,8 2,0 1,4 to learn more about an interesting topic I use Facebook pages of museums as a good place to share 4,4 4,2 4,1 3,5 3,5 the experiences and opinions with the museum Receiving updates about museums' news on Facebook 4,2 3,9 4,1 3,4 3,3 inspires me to visit them I regularly visit the museums that I follow on Facebook 3,7 3,4 3,6 3,2 2,6 I feel confident to share my opinions on museums' Facebook 3,0 2,0 2,9 2,3 1,1 pages I use Facebook pages of museums only as a means to receive 3,9 4,0 3,8 3,9 3,8 information about the exhibitions and events Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
While each of the types will be described in detail in the next sections, Table 4.13 provides an overview of the values and motivations that supplement the descriptions of the profiles of the
65 relationship types. It also emphasizes that the main differences across these motivations divide the types in two larger groups: the more engaged group of ‘Enthusiast’, ‘Connected’, and ‘Contributor’, and the less engaged ‘Interested’ and ‘Informational’.
4.3.1. Enthusiast
‘Enthusiast’ is both the most engaged and the largest group among the relationship types, and Table 4.14 gives a short overview of its key characteristics. This group receives the Facebook news and updates with attention and reacts to them. ‘Enthusiast’ joins Facebook to connect with like-minded people and the museums they are interested in. By demonstrating the fact that they like certain museums and events the members of this type are showing their personality and interests to their network, thus building social connections around their cultural experiences. When it comes to expressing opinions and experiences on museums’ Facebook pages, ‘Enthusiast’ feels confident to share and interact on these pages. Moreover, ‘Enthusiast’ sees Facebook pages of museums as a good place for it.
Table 4.14. Characteristics of the ‘Enthusiast’ Involvement of personality and emotional connection in following a museum on Facebook Desire to interact with museums on Facebook Facebook pages of museums as a good place to share opinions and experiences HIGH Learning about interesting topics through museums' Facebook pages Updates on Facebook about museums as an inspiration for visits Regular visits to the museums followed on Facebook Using Facebook pages of museums as a source of information about the exhibitions and events I follow other history museums on Facebook I read articles and reviews in online or printed press to find information about MODERATE museums Confidence in sharing own opinions on museums' Facebook pages Number of 97 | 31% of total sample respondents Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Learning new interesting things is a strongly motivates the ‘Enthusiast’ to follow museums on Facebook. Another important use of these pages for the 'Enthusiast’ is getting practical information about the exhibitions and activities offered by the museums. News and updates that ‘Enthusiast’ receives through Facebook pages of museums serve as highly inspiring for
66 visiting the museums, which also corresponds to actual museum attendance: ‘Enthusiast’ regularly visits the museums they are following on Facebook. This type is also active in following a variety of other museums on Facebook, and is interested in reading articles and reviews both in online and printed press about the exhibitions and events offered by the museums.
4.3.2. Connected
The most pronounced motivations for following museums on Facebook for this type relate to emotional connection with the museum and its community. They also touch upon the opportunities to express own personality through connecting with the museums and like- minded people. Nevertheless, ‘Connected’ demonstrates less interest in sharing and participation in conversations about museum experiences or contribution to the curatorial choices.
Table 4.15. Characteristics of the ‘Connected’ Involvement of personality and emotional connection in following a museum on Facebook Facebook pages of museums as a good place to share opinions and experiences HIGH Updates on Facebook about museums as an inspiration for visits Using Facebook pages of museums as a source of information about the exhibitions and events Regular visits to the museums followed on Facebook MODERATE I read articles and reviews in online or printed press to find information about museums Desire to interact with museums on Facebook LOW Confidence in sharing own opinions on museums' Facebook pages Learning about interesting topics through museums' Facebook pages Number of 75 | 24% of total sample respondents Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
Although ‘Connected’ sees Facebook pages of museums as good places to share their opinions with museums and related communities, they do not feel confident in participating in these interactions. ‘Connected’ places high importance on the information about exhibitions and events that museums provide through their Facebook pages, and gets inspired by these updates to visit the museums. Another important source of information about the exhibitions and events for this type is articles and reviews in online or printed press. The inspiration that
67 ‘Connected’ gets from Facebook updates of museums turns into action, as this group of respondents regularly visits the museums they follow on Facebook.
4.3.3. Contributor
The type of relationship titled ‘Contributor’ gathers the respondents with the highest desire to interact with the museums through Facebook. This type is highly interested in contributing to discussions with museums, but does not identify itself with abstract feelings of connectedness as much as ‘Enthusiast’. This means that ‘Contributor’ has confidence in sharing own opinions on the Facebook pages of museums and wants to participate in the development of museum exhibitions through this social media. Moreover, this type sees the Facebook pages of museums as a good place for sharing and interactions.
Table 4.16. Characteristics of the ‘Contributor’ Desire to interact with museums on Facebook Facebook pages of museums as a good place to share opinions and experiences HIGH Updates on Facebook about museums as an inspiration for visits Using Facebook pages of museums as a source of information about the exhibitions and events Involvement of personality and emotional connection in following a museum on Facebook MODERATE Confidence in sharing own opinions on museums' Facebook pages Learning about interesting topics through museums' Facebook pages Regular visits to the museums followed on Facebook Number of 48 | 15% of total sample respondents Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
‘Contributor’ uses Facebook pages of museums as the means to get information about the museums, but does not see them as a definitive source for learning something new about an interesting topic. Nevertheless, the updates received by ‘Contributor’ serve as an inspiration for visiting the museums. It is interesting to note that despite the strong willingness to interact through the pages of museums and the inspiration that they provide for the visits this type is moderately active in visiting the museums they follow on Facebook.
68 4.3.4. Interested
Positioned in the middle of the scales both for ‘Personality and connection’ and ‘Desire to interact’, ‘Interested’ represents a moderate extent of involvement with the museums on Facebook. Although ‘Interested’ agrees that the Facebook pages of museums are good places for sharing opinions and experiences with them, they do not feel very confident in sharing on these pages.
‘Interested’ is uses the Facebook pages of museums as a means to get information about their exhibitions and events. While they do not see this information as a source of new learning, it provides inspiration for visiting the museums. As a result, ‘Interested’ sometimes visits the museums that they follow on Facebook. Another source of information about museums that ‘Interested’ is using rather often is the articles and reviews in online and printed press.
Table 4.17. Characteristics of the ‘Interested’ Using Facebook pages of museums as a source of information about the HIGH exhibitions and events Involvement of personality and emotional connection in following a museum on Facebook Desire to interact with museums on Facebook Facebook pages of museums as a good place to share opinions and experiences MODERATE Updates on Facebook about museums as an inspiration for visits Regular visits to the museums followed on Facebook I read articles and reviews in online or printed press to find information about museums Learning about interesting topics through museums' Facebook pages LOW Confidence in sharing own opinions on museums' Facebook pages Number of 63 | 20% of total sample respondents Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
4.3.5. Informational
“Informational” is the smallest group in the typology, and it represents the respondents who do not feel an emotional connection with museums on Facebook and are not interested in contributing to discussions with them on this network. ‘Informational’ does not feel a desire to interact with the museums’ curators on Facebook or contribute to the collaborative
69 development of experiences, and this group does not show confidence in sharing their experiences either. Nevertheless ‘Informational’ sees Facebook as a rather good place for these interactions.
When it comes to the influence of the pages, learning is not a process that attracts ‘Informational’ to follow the studied profiles. They rather see the pages as sources of practical information about the museums and as an inspiration to visit them. Nevertheless, ‘Informational’ does not regularly visit museums that they follow on Facebook.
Table 4.18. Characteristics of the ‘Informational’ Using Facebook pages of museums as a source of information about the HIGH exhibitions and events Facebook pages of museums as a good place to share opinions and experiences MODERATE Updates on Facebook about museums as an inspiration for visits Involvement of personality and emotional connection in following a museum on Facebook Desire to interact with museums on Facebook LOW Learning about interesting topics through museums' Facebook pages Regular visits to the museums followed on Facebook Confidence in sharing own opinions on museums' Facebook pages Number of 28 | 9% of total sample respondents Source: Online survey “Museums in social media” conducted for this study
70 4.4. Summary
This chapter presented the results of collecting empirical data with the use of the quantitative questionnaire developed in this work. The main goal of this research tool is to gather knowledge about the audiences of museums in social media that can be applied for the purposes of museum marketing.
First, the results provided an opportunity to describe the active users of the museum’s Facebook pages. It was possible to identify the general tendencies, such as active use of Facebook in general and primary focus on private communication in using this network. It also identified that the younger audiences are significantly less represented among the respondents. Nevertheless, the exact reasons for such underrepresentation could not be inferred from the research results.
The comparison between the subscriptions to the Facebook pages of museums and visits to those museums demonstrated a connection between the two. This means that the largest share of the followers of the museums was also actively visiting these museums. Still, the causality of this relationship remains to be explored in further research, as it is important to understand whether it is the updates of museums on Facebook that stimulated the visits or the visits resulted in following the museums’ pages.
The typology of followers on Facebook illustrated the motivations and values involved in the interactions with museums through their Facebook pages. It demonstrated that these characteristics appear to be independent from the socio-demographical profiles of the respondents. The typology emphasizes that the audiences of museums in social media are not a homogenous group, but a collection of different motivations and modes of online behaviour.
The results demonstrated that the tool was successful in providing the information necessary to explore the relevance of social media for museum marketing. Nevertheless, it can be further improved and supplemented in order to create a deeper knowledge about the motivational structure of following a museums’ page on Facebook and other factors that may influence this decisions. Moreover, it may be useful to include more information about the choices and environment that accompany the decisions to visit museums.
71 Part 5. DISCUSSION
Based on the key motivations and values involved in interacting with museums through social media I formulated an approach to study the museum followers on Facebook. The survey that was distributed by The National Gallery of Denmark, The National Museum of Denmark, and The David Collection through their Facebook pages provided a range of results that are discussed in this section. I elaborate on the general approach taken to study the audiences of museums on Facebook, compare the subscriptions to museums’ Facebook pages with the actual visits, and discuss the key differences among the Facebook users who follow the pages of museums. I also analyse how the interactive environment of social media corresponds to the goals of museum marketing and how this research can be applied for using social media in the marketing strategies of museums.
5.1. How to study audiences of museums in social media
A number of academic works is dedicated to studying arts and culture experiences in terms of motivations and values involved in their consumption. This research applies a selection of these characteristics to the pages of museums in the social network Facebook. I used quantitative research as a tool to produce knowledge about the audiences who follow museums on Facebook: their general socio-demographical characteristics, motivations for following museums on Facebook, and the connection between following a museum and visiting it.
5.1.1. Quantitative research as a tool
Results drawn from a sample of 311 users of museum’s Facebook pages demonstrated that the research tool developed in this work is able to provide the empirical data necessary for responding to the research objectives.
The survey has been successful in gathering the necessary information to provide a general description of the users of museums’ Facebook pages. I assumed that the survey described the active users, since they read the updates from museums and chose to reply to the survey distributed by the museums. Having reached out to a rather large number of followers, I could
72 compare the results regarding the demographical structure and identify trends and relations within it.
The quantitative nature of the study also allowed using statistical methods to analyse the connections between following museums on Facebook and visiting them. As a result, I identified a relation between these two kinds of behaviour, which is an important contribution for understanding the place of social media in museum marketing strategies.
When it comes to the deeper analysis of motivations that drive Facebook users to follow museums, there are several key results of testing the survey. First, using motivations and values that underlie the actual consumer behaviour allowed dividing the respondents into types according to relationships that are created between them and museums on Facebook. Analysis of distribution of other characteristics (e.g. socio-demographical characteristics, other statement describing the respondents’ use the of the pages of museums on Facebook) demonstrated that the underlying motivations that formed the types do not have a direct relation with other characteristics. Moreover, it showed the relative size of each type and indicated potential challenges that the museums face in reaching out to each of them.
Nevertheless, the use of a quantitative survey means that there may have been other motivations and values that have an important influence on the behaviour of the respondents that may not have been pre-defined in the formulation of the questionnaire. Due to the nature of a quantitative survey, it was not possible to explore motivations in an open-ended way: all the questions are pre-defined by the researcher. Thus one of the results of testing this tool is the recommendation to use mixed research for deeper understanding of the audiences. This means that a qualitative survey with selected audience members can be used to gain more insights into motivations to inform the formulation of the questions for a quantitative survey or to get deeper into results of a survey that was conducted.
5.1.2. Comparison with other studies
Another aspect of testing the approach to studying museum audiences in social media is to compare the acquired results with other research in related areas or using same approaches.
73 Wallace et al. conducted a study with a similar goal, where the authors created a typology of Facebook users who follow commercial brands based on a their activity in sharing the updates of these brands, loyalty to these brands, use of brands that express a personality, personal characteristics of users, and strength of their social networks. It is interesting to compare the results of the typology developed in this thesis with the typology by Wallace et al, since they share similar theoretical foundations and analysis approach.
This thesis resulted in formulation of five types of relationships: ‘Enthusiast’, ‘Connected’, ‘Contributor’, ‘Interested’, and ‘Informational’. The most engaged type is the ‘Enthusiast’, which thus can be compared with the ‘Fan-atics’ described by Wallace et al (2014: p. 101). Both types are genuinely emotionally connected with the museums or brands respectively, and are willing to interact with them. While ‘Enthusiast’ is moderately confident in sharing opinions on museums’ Facebook pages and expressing own views about their offerings, ‘Fan- atics’ are confident opinion leaders who produce highest amount of word-of-mouth recommendations for the brands.
The type of relationship that exhibits high emotional connection with the museums, but does not actively engage in conversations with them is ‘Connected’, and it can be compared with the ‘Authentics’ described by Wallace et al (2014: p. 102). Both types feel an emotional connection with the museums, but while the ‘Connected’ has a low desire to interact with the museum and does not feel confident in participating in such conversations, the ‘Authentics’ are still rather actively sharing word-of-mouth recommendations with their networks.
An active desire to interact with the museums and a rather moderate emotional involvement is expressed by ‘Contributor’, a type that can be compared with ‘Self-Expressives’. The latter is actively interacting around the brand, but shares WOM about it mainly to create an impression on their social network and is their loyalty with the brand may often have a short- term nature. While both of these types are open for sharing and interactions, the main difference lies in the fact that the desire to interact of ‘Connected’ is supported by an emotional attachment to the museum, while ‘Self-Expressives’ focus on creating an impression on their network and do not maintain a high involvement with the brand itself.
74 The other types described by the two frameworks are very different, and this emphasizes how the experiential nature of cultural products transforms the relationships between organisations and consumers. The fourth type identified by Wallace et al is ‘Utilitarians’, who follow brands to get good offers, but are not likely to share any updates from the brand and do not act as opinion leaders. The remaining two types of the relationship typology formed in this work are ‘Interested’ and ‘Informational’. ‘Interested’ is moderately engaged with the organisation and does not express a strong desire to interact, but shows interest in the updates of the museums and uses these updates as an inspiration for rather regular visits. ‘Informational’ is a type that is least involved with the museums, but compared to ‘Utilitarians’ this type follows the museums to be updated with the information about them without necessarily gaining any incentives from these updates.
One of the biggest differences between the two typologies is that compared to the grouping by Wallace et al (2014), where the differentiation of age and sometimes age was a relevant characteristics for the types, results of this thesis show that none of demographical characteristics were distributed significantly different among the types of relationships. Moreover, the comparison shows that while Wallace et al used a wider range of personality- related and materialistic characteristics for describing the types, their typology cannot be directly applied to the environment of arts and culture museums, as the experiential nature of cultural product means that consumption is driven by non-economic motivations (Caves, 2002).
Female respondents largely dominate this survey, but that this is an representation of a general tendency: a variety of research points out to this division both for consumption of arts and culture and the level of activity on Facebook (Bak et al., 2012). In both cases, gender in not equally distributed, and female respondents are in majority. For example, the research of the cultural habits of the Danish population shows that 45% of female respondents and 35% of male respondents have visited an art museum within a year, and 40% female respondents and 34% male respondents visited museums of cultural history (Ibid. 2012: p. 69).
Considering the use of social media in general, the activity of female users also tends to be higher. According to the research of the cultural habits of the Danish population, 55% of women and 48% of men use social media in their free time (Bak et al., 2012: p. 187). These
75 results are also supplemented by the fact that 43% women and 34% men use Internet in their free time to find information about cultural institutions and activities (Ibid.). Although the difference between the share of genders in the results of this thesis is much larger: 74% female and 26% male respondents, it appears to reflect the general patterns observed in nation-wide research. Inferring any characteristics from this gender difference lacks foundation, but it is important as a confirmation of the fact that the unequal distribution of gender in the results is close to a realistic representation of the general sample.
Another tendency appears through comparison between the age groups of the arts and culture audiences. In the results of this thesis the youngest age group is represented significantly less than other ones: 3% of 15 to 19 years old respondents compared to 32% of other groups on average. Compared to that, studies on a bigger scale also demonstrate a different distribution of age groups according to visits to museums in Denmark, where the youngest group is one of the most active museum visitors. For example, the study of cultural habits of the Danish population showed that 41% of the population in the age group of 15-19 years old visited museums of art museums in the past year compared to the average of 40% in the other groups, 37% visited museums of cultural history compared to the average of 36% in the other age groups, and 28% of them visited museums related to nature compared to 17% (Bak et al., 2012). The difference between the level of activity of the youngest audience group on museum’s Facebook pages and their actual visits to museums indicates that possibly a large share of this group is currently not reached by the communication of museums through their Facebook pages.
5.2. Connection between following and visiting
Analysis of relationships between following museums and visiting them demonstrated that the most active visitors of museums also dominated among the followers of those museums on Facebook. Nevertheless, it also showed that the two actions are not always connected, since a share of followers living in a close proximity to the collaborating museums did not often visit them.
As a bridge between visiting to museums and connecting with them in social media, Facebook profiles of museums provide opportunities for implementing relationship marketing practices
76 to build long-term relationships with the consumers. Guillon (2011) argues that the evaluation of the success of relationship marketing practices, which largely focuses on maintaining consumer loyalty, should be focused on the goals of the organisations. The goals of museum marketing are to attract more people to visit museums and to increase access to the cultural experiences that they provide (N. G. Kotler et al., 2008). Since the results show that most of the active followers of the studied museums have visited them within the past year, communication and interaction with these followers through Facebook updates provides opportunities for maintaining persistent presence of the museum in the consideration of their target audiences until the next visits.
The customer engagement cycle described by Sashi (2012) makes it possible to argue that the respondents belonging to each level of engagement with the museums may change their level of engagement depending on their situation, but also in response to the communication style of the museum. Therefore, it is important to maintain consistency in communication, adapting it with regard to the best practices that can be observed from the history of successes and failures of user engagement through updates and sharing.
5.3. An emerging digital audience of museums
While all respondents are expected to follow at least one of the studied museums on Facebook, many of them do not visit these museums regularly. ‘Enthusiast’ and ‘Connected’ regularly visit the museums they follow on Facebook and get inspired to visit by their Facebook updates, but ‘Contributor’ and ‘Interested’ do not visit museums as much, and ‘Informational’ is not an active visitor of museums. This leads to a question: what motivates the social media users who are not actively visiting museums to keep updated with them by following their pages on Facebook?
One of the results gives a hint: all of the user types, no matter the level of engagement with the museums, indicated that they are interested in the practical information that museums share on their Facebook pages. Moreover, ‘Enthusiast’, ‘Connected’ and ‘Contributor’ get highly inspired by the updates shared by the museums for the visits. At the same time ‘Interested’ and ‘Informational’ are also rather inspired by these updates, which means that even for those who are not regularly visiting museums their updates are still interesting.
77 These results indicate that there is a special kind of online consumption for the information provided by the cultural organisations. In this case I am not speaking about the digital collections or other arts and culture experiences that have been transferred online. In this work I suggest that the interaction with the cultural organisation is an experience, which is the motivation attracting people who may not be visiting the museums in their physical locations to still keep updated with the museums.
In the literature review I elaborated on the possibility to create added value for arts and culture experiences by using the opportunities of the social media environment. This research demonstrated that indeed there is a large group of people who follow the social media profiles of museums while not necessarily visiting the museums regularly. This may be a new kind of digital consumer of arts and culture, who prioritises in cultural experiences online and choses them over attending the physical locations of the museums or probably separates the two experiences.
5.4. The quest for participation
Results demonstrated that for a large share of the respondents, such as ‘Connected’, ‘Interested’ and ‘Informational’ types, receiving updates and information from the museums is more important that engaging in interactions with them. When ‘Connected’ is considered, their presence and active following may not be as visible, but this group appreciates the same broad range of updates about the museum. Nevertheless, they do not feel confident in sharing their opinion and do not express a desire to interact and join the development of offer. While it may seem that the followers are not interacting much on their pages, users like the ‘Connected’ are actually following the updates with interest and use them as an inspiration for the actual visit, and results show that the actual visits happen rather regularly. Nevertheless, there is a potential in engaging this group through Facebook as they see it a good place for sharing the opinions.
Although interaction is still important for many of the respondents and should not be overlooked, it may be useful to see the Facebook pages of museums as platforms for different kinds of interactions, allowing the followers who prefer active participation or connecting with museums emotionally to find some sources for each. This also means that the lack of
78 expressed activity toward a post or an update does not necessarily mean low engagement, since many of the followers are more interested in receiving content that interacting with the museums, and often they do not feel very confident to participate in such interactions.
This research demonstrates that the users of museums’ social media are very different, and their preferences can often be opposite. Thus it is both important to engage the users that are willing to interact and to provide the less interactive user types with something they can relate to without necessary direct interaction.
From the demographical structure of the sample, as compared with the research of the general population of Denmark earlier in the Discussion, it can be inferred that despite the regular visits to museums by the youngest age group (15-19 years old), they are not as well represented on Facebook. The results of this research do not provide the necessary overview of the potential reasons for a lower involvement of the younger audiences. Nevertheless, it is a challenge that needs to be further explored through research.
5.5. Using social media as a part of museum marketing strategy
This research demonstrates that social media provides an opportunity to remain connected with the museum audiences outside the actual visits. For example, user types like ‘Enthusiast’ and ‘Connected’ feel emotionally engaged with the museums in social media and are willing to interact and share their experiences on museums’ pages. Nevertheless, ‘Informational’ type does not have a strong feeling of connection or desire to interact, but still this type follows the museums’ social media while the actual visits do not take place as often as for the ‘Enthusiast’ and ‘Connected’. ‘Interested’ appears to be a moderately involved type that may possibly change the position according to a cycle of customer engagement to a more or less involved depending on their personal characteristics and communication style of the museums.
Results demonstrated that Facebook is more than an advertising tool in the museum marketing strategies. It offers vast opportunities for direct communication with target audiences, maintaining long-term presence in their consideration, and even involving them at the core of the museum experiences. The value of Facebook and other social networks for
79 word-of-mouth marketing is large, especially with the high importance of recommendations of family and friends for the choice to attend certain museums and exhibitions.
Therefore, one of the key challenges that museums face when using social media for marketing purposes is to move further using it as an informational and advertising platforms. Museums need to establish approaches to encourage participation and interaction on their pages, and according to Grøn et al (2013), choice of suitable content can be one of the keys to establishing the interactive environment of the pages.
Nevertheless the results also demonstrated that an existence of a mute share of audience does not always mean that the engagement of users is low. Instead, it is important to remember that different types may have opposite preferences, and only a share of all respondents is actually feeling confident and willing to interact with the museums. There are three types of relationships who are not active in interactions: ‘Connected’, who is emotionally attached to museums, is actively reading museum updates and who appreciates Facebook as a good place to share museum experiences. Also ‘Interested’, who is moderately connected and feels a rather small willingness to interact, but nevertheless appreciates the updates of museums and visits them rather often. The third one is ‘Informational’, and only this type shows low interaction in a frame of low involvement with museums. Notably, ‘Informational’ is also the smallest group among the respondents.
80 Part 6. CONCLUSION
This research developed and tested an approach to study the audiences of museums in social media. The research tool proved to be usable for describing the Facebook followers of museums, and allowed to identify trends among these audiences. Therefore, with the use of research based on motivations involved in arts and culture consumption museum marketers can develop a deeper understanding of their audiences in social media.
The main goal of this work is to find out how social media can be relevant for museum marketing. The results demonstrated that social media is a unique tool for engaging museum audiences in interaction and co-creation online. Thus, social media is more than another platform for sharing information and advertising, which provides large opportunities for reaching out to new audiences and for strengthening relationships with the existing ones.
This research demonstrated that often Facebook presence of museums inspires their social media followers to visit them at their physical locations. It indicated that there is a connection between the fact of following a museum in social media and attending it. Nevertheless, the causality of this relation could not be described. It also described the emerging digital audiences, who are interested in following the museums on social media and interacting with them, but are not necessarily visiting the museums, even when they are located nearby.
By using quantitative research I formulated five distinct types of social media users who follow museum pages: ‘Enthusiast’, ‘Connected’, ‘Contributor’, ‘Informational’, and ‘Interested’. Each of the types is based on the two main dimensions: desire to interact with the museums and the feeling of personal connectedness with the museum itself and the experiences it provides. These types illustrated the new audience development in the arts and culture sector: audiences who follow museums in social media and get inspired by their updates, but who at the same time do not visits museums often or feel motivated to do so. Although each of the relationship types places a high value on the information provided by museums in social media, the results of this work also indicate that this social media communication is becoming a cultural experience of its own.
81 I identified a gap between the youngest social media audiences of museums aged 15-19 and the other age groups. Although secondary research demonstrated that the youngest group is actively visiting museums, they were significantly underrepresented among the respondents. Moreover, I found out that there is a larger share of female audiences following and interacting with the arts and culture organisations on Facebook.
The approach to creating a typology of Facebook users based on underlying motivations is rather new and does not have a long history of its testing. When researching academic literature, the author discovered a recently conducted study with a similar research approach, which emphasised the novelty of segmentation of social media audiences according to the underlying motivations for following the Facebook pages of museums. Comparison of the results of this work with the typology of users who follow brands on Facebook showed that the audiences of arts and culture are driven by a different motivational structure, and thus these two studies provided rather different results in terms of types and their descriptions.
The results of this study are largely explorative and provide inspiration for museum marketing strategy formulation. Nevertheless, this approach needs to be tested further on different samples and to be supplemented with further characteristics in order to deepen the knowledge of the possibilities that social media provides for reaching the goals of museum marketing.
Application of this research to museum marketing strategies is possible to a limited extent due to its explorative nature. Nevertheless, it clearly places social media aside from the advertising platforms, demonstrating its large potential for building relationships with the audiences through two-way communication.
82 LIMITATIONS
Three main types of limitations are affecting the validity and applicability of this research: limitations related to researcher, content limitations, and method limitations (Eriksson & Kovalainen, 2010; Given, 2008).
As the researcher, I brought subjectivity to this thesis through using my interpretations of theory and data. Thus it is important to highlight that the theoretical constructs and research statements implemented in the study are not a universal approach. Due to the subjectivity involved in their formulations it is advisable to regard this research as an exploration of the possible options to study of the social media audiences of museums that does not provide an objective view on their characteristics.
Due to time and resource constraints I limited the amount of content in this work. The typology could have benefited from more variables and statements, but their integration would have required a research on a much larger scale than a master thesis.
The main method used to obtain information about the respondents is quantitative research. The research could have improved by supplementing it with deeper qualitative study of the motivations and values that lead to following the pages of museums on Facebook. I included questions asking for contact information in the questionnaire, but the responses were unequally distributed among user types and regions, making the interviews with existing contacts unrepresentative.
The results of this thesis can be internally generalized by the three collaborating museums, since they directly describe their audiences. On a broader scale the results can only be generalized to a limited extent as guiding indications about audience behaviour in relations to the Facebook profiles of museums and possible strategies in social media communication for marketing strategies of organisations working within the arts and culture sector.
83 OPPORTUNITIES FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
This research achieved a range of goals set for this work. Nevertheless, based on the obtained results it is possible to improve this survey for creating deeper knowledge about museum audiences on Facebook and in social media in general.
The results of this research demonstrate that audiences contacted by museums through Facebook are not homogenous in their behaviour and preferences. Instead, they show five distinct user types that have different levels of connectedness with the museums and their communities, and demonstrate different levels of the desire to interact with them. This finding gives a new perspective on the discussions of museum marketing and communications through social media by showing how these audiences can differ across characteristics that are not directly related to the socio-demographical qualities. A possible next step for a research in this area can be to study the user types more closely to develop a deeper understanding of their preferences and underlying motivations for following museums on social media and visiting them.
Another important finding that can be studied further is that the different relationship types also have a different behaviour in terms of visiting the museums. It can be useful to conduct closer studies of the factors involved in this connection, and to find out whether there are some other elements influencing the final decision to attend the museum. Moreover, the context of visits can also be a subject of studies to understand how it can influence the relationships created with museums online. There is a number of studies of mediation services and elements of the actual visiting experience, but it will be a next step to develop an understanding of how an experience of the museum visit can be connected to the long-term participation in the museums’ social media.
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89 APPENDIX A
Survey questionnaire: version in English
Note: Questions 3 and 4 were only included in the distribution of the survey by The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) by the request of the museum.
1. What is your age?
(1) q 15-19 (2) q 20-29 (3) q 30-49 (4) q 50+
2. What is your gender?
(1) q Female (2) q Male
3. Where do you live?
(1) q Copenhagen or Greater Copenhagen area (The Capital region) (2) q Zealand (3) q Other region of Denmark (4) q Other country (Please specify) ______
4. What is your latest completed education?
(1) q Primary / Middle school (2) q Vocational education (1-year youth education) (3) q Upper secondary education (High school / Gymnasium) (4) q Vocational education / training (skilled work, crafts) (5) q Short-cycle higher education (1-2 years) (6) q Mid-cycle higher education (3-4 years) (7) q Long-cycle higher education (5 years and more) (8) q Don’t want to disclose (9) q Other (Please specify) ______
5. What is your occupation?
(1) q Full-time employment (2) q Part-time employment (3) q Self-employed (4) q Pensioner (5) q Retirement from the workforce (6) q Temporarily outside the workforce (7) q Unemployed (8) q Other (Please specify) ______
90 6. What are your leisure interests? (Multiple answers are possible)
(1) q Sport (2) q Reading books (3) q Going to exhibitions in museums and galleries (4) q Watching films (5) q Music (listening, going to music concerts etc.) (6) q Going out in the city (cafés, restaurants, bars, clubs) (7) q Other (please specify) ______
7. How often do you use Facebook?
(1) q Every day (2) q 1-2 times a week (3) q 1-3 times a month (4) q Less (5) q Never
8. I use Facebook for: (Multiple answers are possible)
(1) q Private communication via Facebook e-mail and/or messenger (with friends, family, etc.) (2) q Professional or work-related communication (for work) (3) q Finding hobby clubs, sports activities, cafés / restaurants in my area (4) q Finding art exhibitions and other cultural activities (concerts, festivals etc.) in my area (6) q Read news (7) q To share my daily experiences (through photographs, video, text) on my Facebook page (8) q Other (please specify) ______
9. Select an answer in each row for the two questions
Do you follow the page of this Did you visit the following
museum on Facebook? museums in the past year? 3 or more Don't Yes No 1-2 times No times know The National Gallery of (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q Denmark (SMK)
The David Collection (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Louisiana (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Arken (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Ordrupgaard (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
The Hirschsprung Collection (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q The National Museum of (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q Denmark
91 Do you follow the page of this Did you visit the following
museum on Facebook? museums in the past year? 3 or more Don't Yes No 1-2 times No times know The Natural History Museum of Denmark (incl. The Botanic Garden, the Geological (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q Museum and the Zoological Museum) Other art galleries and museums (for example, fine (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q art, photography, video art) Other history museums (for example, a museum dedicated (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q to a certain period of history or to a history of culture) Other museums dedicated to nature and environment (for (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q example, Aquarium)
10. Where do you usually find information about the exhibitions and events at these museums? (Multiple answers are possible)
(11) q Official websites of museums (1) q Email newsletters by the museums (2) q Family and friends (3) q Facebook (4) q Other social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Google +, Pinterest, etc.) (5) q Advertisements in the city: buses, advertisement boards etc. (6) q Advertisements in magazines, newspapers, etc. (7) q Articles and reviews in online or printed press (8) q Flyers, postcards etc. (12) q Website / Facebook page of Kulturklik.dk (13) q Kulturkik magazine (9) q Don't know (10) q Other (please specify) ______
11. Do you agree with the following statements? I use Facebook pages of museums as:
(Select one answer in each row)
Neither Strongly Strongly Agree agree nor Disagree Don't know agree disagree disagree 1) An opportunity to connect to something greater: art, (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q history, culture etc.
92 (Select one answer in each row)
Neither Strongly Strongly Agree agree nor Disagree Don't know agree disagree disagree 2) A source of knowledge to learn more about an (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q interesting topic 3) A good place to share the experiences and opinions with (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q the museum 4) An opportunity to join a community of like-minded (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q people 5) A pleasure of connecting with the museums that are (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q interesting for me 6) A way to demonstrate my interests and personality to my (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q network (pages I “like”, what I share and comment) 7) Only a means to receive information about the (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q exhibitions and events
12. Do you agree with the following statements?
(Select one answer in each row) Neither Strongly Strongly Agree agree nor Disagree Don't know agree disagree disagree 1) I would like to participate in development of museum exhibitions and activities through Facebook (share my (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q opinions or interpretations of objects, select the objects and topics for exhibitions) 2) I would like to have an opportunity to write to curators of exhibitions to share my opinion about different art (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q objects (paintings, sculptures, installations) through Facebook
93 (Select one answer in each row) Neither Strongly Strongly Agree agree nor Disagree Don't know agree disagree disagree 3) I regularly visit the museums that I follow (like) (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q on Facebook 4) Receiving updates about museums' news on Facebook (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q inspires me to visit them 5) Receiving updates from museums on Facebook has no (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q influence on my desire to visit them 6) I feel confident to share my opinions on museums' (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q Facebook pages 7) I think that people should share their opinions on museums' Facebook pages (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q only when they have a deep knowledge and understanding of art
13. To supplement the survey I would like to organize a group interview to discuss the experiences of Danish museums’ communication on Facebook. The one-hour interview will take place in Copenhagen, and there will be coffee and cakes for the participants. Please write your email in the field below if you would like to share your experiences for my research.
14. If you have any questions or comments about this research or the questionnaire you are welcome to write them in the box below or send to me at [email address].
94 Survey questionnaire: version in Danish
Note: Questions 3 and 4 were only included in the distribution of the survey by The National Gallery of Denmark (SMK) by the request of the museum.
1. Hvilken aldersgruppe er du i?
(1) q 15-19 (2) q 20-29 (3) q 30-49 (4) q 50+
2. Angiv dit køn
(1) q Kvinde (2) q Mand
3. Hvor er du bosat?
(1) q København / Region Hovedstaden (2) q Region Sjælland (3) q Andet region i Danmark (4) q Andet land (Angiv venligst) ______
4. Hvad er din senest afsluttede uddannelse?
(1) q Folkeskole, mellemskole, realeksamen (2) q EFG/HG/Teknisk skole (1-årige ungdoms udd.) (3) q HH/Studentereksamen/HF (4) q Erhvervsuddannelse (faglært, håndværker, HK mm) (5) q Kort videregående uddannelse (1-2 år) (6) q Mellemlang videregående uddannelse (3-4 år) (7) q Lang videregående uddannelse (5 år eller derover) (8) q Ønsker ikke at oplyse (9) q Andet (Beskriv venligst) ______
5. Hvad er din beskæftigelse?
(1) q Fuldtidsansat (2) q Deltidsansat (3) q Selvstændig (4) q Pensionist (5) q Tilbagetrækning fra arbejdsstyrken (6) q Midlertidigt udenfor arbejdsstyrken (7) q Arbejdsløs (8) q Andet (Beskriv venligst) ______
95 6. Hvad er dine fritidsinteresser? (Sæt gerne flere krydser) (1) q At dyrke sport og motion (2) q At læse bøger (3) q At besøge udstillinger i museer og gallerier (4) q At se film (5) q At lytte til musik, at gå til koncerter (6) q At gå i byen (f.eks. caféer, restauranter, barer) (7) q Andet (Beskriv venligst) ______
7. Hvor ofte bruger du Facebook?
(1) q Hver dag (2) q 1-2 gange om ugen (3) q 1-3 gange om måneden (4) q Sjældnere (5) q Aldrig
8. Hvad bruger du Facebook til? (Sæt gerne flere krydser) (1) q Privat kommunikation via Facebook mail / Facebook messenger (med familie, venner, osv.) (2) q Karriere-/Arbejdsrelateret kommunikation (for at løse arbejdsopgaver) (3) q For at finde foreninger, caféer og restauranter i mit område (4) q For at finde kunstudstillinger og andre kulturelle særarrangementer i mit område (6) q For at læse nyheder (7) q For at dele mine daglige oplevelser (billeder, videoer, tekst) på min Facebook side (8) q Andet (Beskriv venligst) ______
9. Sæt ét kryds i hver række for to spørgsmål
Følger du disse museer på Har du været på disse museer Facebook (sider du ”synes godt inden for det seneste år? om”)? 3 gange Ja Nej eller 1-2 gange Nej Ved ikke mere SMK (Statens Museum for (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q Kunst)
Davids Samling (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Ny Carslberg Glyptotek (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Louisiana (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Arken (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Ordrupgaard (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Den Hirschsprungske Samling (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
Nationalmuseet (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q
96 Følger du disse museer på Har du været på disse museer Facebook (sider du ”synes godt inden for det seneste år? om”)? 3 gange Ja Nej eller 1-2 gange Nej Ved ikke mere Statens Naturhistoriske Museum (inkl. Botanisk Have, (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q Geologisk Museum og Zoologisk Museum) Andre kunstmuseer/ (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q kunstudstillinger Andet kulturhistorisk museum (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q (fx. Københavns Museum) Andet naturhistorisk museum (1) q (2) q (1) q (2) q (3) q (4) q (fx. Akvarium)
10. Hvor får du information omkring disse museers udstillinger og arrangementer? (Sæt gerne flere krydser)
(11) q Museernes officielle hjemmesider (1) q Nyheds-mails fra museerne (2) q Familie og venner (3) q Facebook (4) q Andre sociale medier (Twitter, Instagram, Google +, Pinterest m.m.) (5) q Reklamer / Annonceringer i bybilledet på busser, reklamesøjler m.m. (6) q Reklamer / Annoncer i blade, magasiner og aviser (7) q Anmeldelser og artikler online eller i trykte publikationer (8) q Brochurer, postkort m.m. (12) q Hjemmeside / Facebook side Kulturklik.dk (13) q Magasin Kulturkik (9) q Ved ikke (10) q Andet (Beskriv venligst ) ______
11. Hvor enig eller uenig er du i følgende udsagn? Jeg bruger museernes Facebook profiler som:
(Sæt ét kryds i hver række)
Hverken Meget enig Enig enig eller Uenig Meget uenig Ved ikke uenig 1) En mulighed for at forbinde med et større begreb som (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q kunst, historie, kultur osv. 2) Et middel til at dele mine (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q erfaringer og meninger med
97 (Sæt ét kryds i hver række)
Hverken Meget enig Enig enig eller Uenig Meget uenig Ved ikke uenig museerne 3) En mulighed for at få mere viden on noget, der (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q interesserer mig 4) En mulighed for at deltage i (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q et ligesindet fælleskab 5) Et fornøjelse at forbinde med museer der interesserer (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q mig 6) En måde at vise mine interesser og personlighed til min netværk (sider jeg ”synes (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q godt om”, dem jeg deler og kommenterer) 7) Bare et middel til at få informationer om udstillinger (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q og arrangementer
12. Hvor enig eller uenig er du i følgende udsagn?
(Sæt ét kryds i hver række) Hverken Meget enig Enig enig eller Uenig Meget uenig Ved ikke uenig 1) Jeg vil gerne bidrage til sammensætningen af fremtidige udstillinger ved at dele mine meninger omkring (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q diverse kunstgenstande (malerier / skulpturer / andet) via Facebook 2) Jeg vil gerne have mulighed for at skrive til udstillingernes kuratorer og debatere (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q udstillingernes indtryk, oplevelser m.m. 3) Jeg besøger jævnligt de museer som jeg følger (synes (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q godt om) på Facebook 4) Jeg bliver mere inspireret til at besøge museer som jeg får (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q nyhedsopdateringer fra via
98 (Sæt ét kryds i hver række) Hverken Meget enig Enig enig eller Uenig Meget uenig Ved ikke uenig Facebook 5) Museernes nyhedsopdateringer inspirerer (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q mig ikke til at besøge dem 6) Jeg ytrer gerne mine meninger og holdninger på (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q museernes Facebook sider 7) Jeg mener kun man skal ytre sine meninger og holdninger på museernes Facebook-sider, (6) q (5) q (4) q (3) q (2) q (1) q hvis man har en forudgående viden og forståelse for kunsten
13. Jeg vil gerne supplere undersøgelsen med en interview i gruppe, hvor man kan dele oplevelser af (de danske) museers kommunikation på Facebook. Der er afsat 1 time til undersøgelsen, den vil foregå i København og der vil være kaffe og kage til de fremmødte. Skriv din email herunder hvis du vil dele dine oplevelser for min undersøgelse.
14. Hvis du har nogle spørgsmål eller yderligere kommentarer er du meget velkommen til at skrive dem her eller til min mail [email].
99 APPENDIX B
Results of the survey: general description of the respondents
Source for all tables in the Appendix B is the online survey “Museums in Social Media” conducted for this study
Table B.1. Region of residents: countries listed in the “other country” option
Brazil 1 Germany 1 Island 5 Israel 1 Italy 1 Mexico 1 Norway 1 South Korea 1 Spain 1 Sweden 5 USA 2 Total 20
Table B.2. Responses to the question “How often do you use Facebook?”
Every day 297 95% 1-2 times a week 14 5% Total number of 311 100% completed responses
100 Table B.3. Use of Facebook by the respondents and the followers of the three museums
All The National The National The David "I use Facebook for…" respondent Gallery Museum Collection s Private communication via Facebook e-mail and/or 276 89% 153 90% 171 86% 28 90% messenger (with friends, family, etc.) Read news 160 51% 84 49% 108 55% 19 61% Finding art exhibitions and other cultural activities 152 49% 96 56% 93 47% 21 68% (concerts, festivals etc.) in my area To share my daily experiences (through photographs, video, 152 49% 73 43% 105 53% 21 68% text) on my Facebook page Professional or work-related 80 26% 53 31% 47 24% 7 23% communication (for work) Finding hobby clubs, sports activities, cafés / restaurants in 61 20% 35 21% 43 22% 8 26% my area Total number of completed 311 170 198 31 responses
Table B.4. Use of Facebook according to age groups
Age Use of Facebook 15-19 20-29 30-49 50+ Private communication via Facebook e- mail and/or messenger (with friends, 9 100% 89 98% 111 86% 67 82% family, etc.) Read news 4 44% 42 46% 67 52% 47 57% Finding art exhibitions and other cultural activities (concerts, festivals etc.) in my 0 0% 50 55% 58 45% 44 54% area To share my daily experiences (through photographs, video, text) on my Facebook 3 33% 37 41% 65 50% 47 57% page Professional or work-related 2 22% 26 29% 39 30% 13 16% communication (for work) Finding hobby clubs, sports activities, 2 22% 21 23% 27 21% 11 13% cafés / restaurants in my area Total number of respondents in the 9 91 129 82 age group
101 Table B.5. Sources of information about museums for all respondents and followers of the three museums
All The National The National The David Source of information respondents Gallery Museum Collection Official websites of museums 248 80% 132 77,6 159 80,3 25 80,6 Facebook 242 78% 142 83,5 163 82,3 25 80,6 Family and friends 169 54% 99 58,2 103 52,0 16 51,6 Articles and reviews in 91 53,5 87 43,9 18 58,1 149 48% online or printed press Email newsletters by the 83 48,8 89 44,9 19 61,3 132 42% museums Advertisements in the city: 66 38,8 71 35,9 15 48,4 buses, advertisement boards 112 36% etc. Advertisements in 68 40,0 63 31,8 14 45,2 108 35% magazines, newspapers, etc. Website / Facebook page of 46 27,1 58 29,3 9 29,0 79 25% Kulturklik.dk Flyers, postcards etc. 56 18% 33 19,4 41 20,7 6 19,4 Other social networks 20 11,8 15 7,6 3 9,7 (Twitter, Instagram, Google 27 9% +, Pinterest, etc.) Kulturkik magazine 11 4% 9 5,3 8 4,0 2 6,5 Total 311 170 198 31
102 Table B.6. Sources of information about museums across age groups
Source of information 15-19 20-29 30-49 50+ Official websites of museums 5 56% 77 85% 107 83% 59 72% Email newsletters by the 0 0% 37 41% 56 43% 39 48% museums Family and friends 7 78% 61 67% 63 49% 38 46% Facebook 7 78% 83 91% 95 74% 57 70% Other social networks (Twitter, Instagram, Google +, 0 0% 7 8% 13 10% 7 9% Pinterest, etc.) Advertisements in the city: buses, advertisement boards 3 33% 46 51% 50 39% 13 16% etc. Advertisements in magazines, 3 33% 35 38% 49 38% 21 26% newspapers, etc. Articles and reviews in online 3 33% 47 52% 61 47% 38 46% or printed press Flyers, postcards etc. 0 0% 19 21% 25 19% 12 15% Website / Facebook page of 1 11% 21 23% 35 27% 22 27% Kulturklik.dk Kulturkik magazine 0 0% 3 3% 5 4% 3 4% Total number of respondents in the age 9 91 129 82 group
Table B.7. Leisure interests of the respondents
All The National The National The David
respondents Gallery Museum Collection Going to exhibitions in 263 85% 154 50% 167 54% 28 9% museums and galleries Reading books 235 76% 122 39% 153 49% 25 8% Music (listening, going to 189 61% 110 35% 113 36% 20 6% music concerts etc.) Watching films 181 58% 108 35% 111 36% 21 7% Going out in the city (cafes, restaurants, bars, 159 51% 101 32% 92 30% 15 5% clubs) Sport 119 38% 76 24% 67 22% 17 5% Total number of 311 170 198 31 respondents
103