Instagram and Online Presence Among Art Museums An Investigation of Instagram Content on Audience Engagement Student Name: Jullaya Vorasuntharosoth Student Number: 383706 Supervisor: Dr. Trilce Navarrete Hernandez Master Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication Erasmus University Rotterdam Master's Thesis June 2018 ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to examine how and why art museums engage with audiences on Instagram and to identify the factors that indicate a successful social media strategy. Instagram, in particular, the image-based social media platform that is suitable to present and mediate digital visual content. It offered the opportunities for the museum to mediate between communication and content-presentation in the platform that extended beyond the physical space of the museum; allowing the museum to create new experiences through their audiences’ involvement and active participation. Therefore, knowing what forms of activity will be most effective, and what prompts the audience to engage are all crucial to the success of social media activity in the museum sector. While previous studies have focused on the consumer perception of the social media usage among museums, little attention has been paid to how museums implement social media effectively. The research question is: How do museums communicate through Instagram and to what extent does an Instagram account reflect the institutional objectives to engage with the audience? This thesis is conducted on the basis of qualitative content analysis, by analyzing and interpreting the contents from three of the prominent art museums in the Netherland: the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum and the Van Gogh Museum. The analysis not only revealed the specific characteristics that varied between the museums, but also the importance of Instagram in terms of audience engagement. In addition, three emerging themes demonstrate the objectives of museums on Instagram, namely, enabling digital consumption of artworks; taste formation and education, and public image of the museum. All in all, three museums show some common tendencies to engage with its audience, while the effectiveness of the strategy comes to how they can manage to catch on the attention of the audience and stimulate them to interact. Keywords: Instagram, social media, audience engagement, museum, online presence 2 Table of Contents Abstract and Keywords 1. Introduction 4 2. Theoretical Framework 9 2.1. Taste Formation 9 2.2. Digital Museum Consumption 10 2.3. Participatory Culture 12 2.4. Marketing in the Museum Context 14 2.5 Marketing Art Museum in Social Media 16 2.6 Representation Theory 18 3. Research Design 20 3.1. Methodology 20 3.2. Sample 21 3.3. Data Analysis 23 4. Results and Discussion 27 4.1. Specific Characteristics Found (Per Museum) 27 4.2. Enabling Digital Consumption of the Artworks 31 4.3. Taste Formation and Education 33 4.4. Public Image of the Museum 35 4.5. Audience Engagement 37 4.6. Determinant That Influence Audience Engagement 39 5. Conclusion 42 5.1. Limitations and Implications for Further Research 44 References 46 Appendix A 50 Appendix B 53 Appendix C 59 3 1. INTRODUCTION In the past three decades, museums have adopted different types of technology to organize, catalog, and communicate facts about their collections (López, Margapoti, Maragliano and Bove, 2010). The recent development of a new generation of Internet- based applications, known as Web 2.0 social media, has created new prospects for museums to communicate and interact with the public (Kotler, 2001; Proctor, 2010; Kidd, 2011). According to López et al. (2010) 93% of museums in the developed countries has adopted social media in their communication strategies. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), for example, has one of the most active social media approaches in the museums sector with 3,3 million followers on Instagram, 5,24 million followers on Twitter, and 2 million likes on Facebook. With the growing popularity of social media, there are an increasing number of research projects and studies aimed at describing and analyzing the specific ways in which Web 2.0 tools may be used by museums (López et al., 2010). However, most of the research on social media usage in the museum sector tends to focus on the consumer side. Although a number of museums have started utilizing social media as part of their marketing strategies, there is as of yet little information regarding effective implementation of marketing strategies in social media (Fletcher and Lee, 2012). The importance of such research is necessary for the growing body of technological innovation processes in the cultural sector (Padilla-Meléndez and Águila-Obra, 2013). As cultural institutions, museums are called on to be attentive to visitors’ needs and to make heritage objects accessible to a public, bridging the gap between them (ICOM, 2006). In addition to acquiring, safeguarding, conserving, and showcasing artefacts and artworks, museums increasingly play an educational role in their community interactions (ICOM, 2006). The museum and its collections become the center of knowledge building based on the discussion, exchange and collaboration of many actors such as artists, curator, critics and visitors (López et al., 2010). This process serves as a foundation of the arts and the wider creative sector, by “nurturing and advancing culture at local, national and international levels and creating significant public value” (Bakhshi and Throsby, 2012, pp.206). 4 Social media provides a unique way of fulfilling the museum’s duty through enhanced interactivity between the museum and its audience on the one hand, and technological convergence on the other hand, allowing consumers to access the collections at any time, from any place, and in any form (Bakhshi and Throsby, 2012). It allows the museum to create new experiences and learning opportunities through their audiences’ involvement and active participation. Moreover, Kotler (2011) argues that social media serve as an extension of a physical museum; it takes art outside the museum walls and onto a space where everyone could participate. Moreover, social media prompted the shift towards multi-directional many-to-many communication and is seen to result in strategy that is based on the ‘conversation’ rather than the lecture (Kidd, 2011). Collaboration and co-production has increasingly become a prominent frame of social media initiatives within the museum sector. One of the claims that is being made about social media is that it helps build and sustain communities of interest around the museum (Kidd, 2011). Exploring and emphasizing this potential is thus a key part of the strategy to engage the audience on social media. Instagram is a social media mobile-application platform launched in October 2010 and has gained much popularity since then, surpassing Twitter in terms of number of users and time spent on the application (Russmann and Svensson, 2016). It offers the user a unique way to share photos and videos and apply different editing tools (filters). In addition to posting and manipulating contents, Instagram also provides similar social connectivity as other social media channels. Users can connect with each other by ‘following’, and they can ‘like’ and comment on the posts. It also allows users to add captions and hashtags (#) to describe the photos and videos, and tag or mention other users by using the @ symbol before posting them (Hu, Manikonda and Kambhampati, 2014). Instagram was chosen as a subject for the study because this image-based social media platform is particularly popular at this moment due to the widespread of smartphone. The adoption of Instagram among museums is significant because it signals a mobile, image-centered, and organic mode of sharing their collections which differs qualitatively from professional photography in the support of the traditional form of communication (McNely, 2012). Instagram allows for the digital ‘curation’ of content in 5 which museums can present the desired images directly to the audience, interacting from their personal device and without the need to ‘visit’ the museum. This serves as a means for explaining differences in meaning and activity of online participation (Hogan, 2010). This thesis considers the role of Instagram in art institutions, with particular reference to art museums, for the following reasons: First, social media are primary drivers of change in cultural consumption, therefore, marketing strategies in museums are likely to look particularly to the use of social media in dealing with their audiences (Bakhshi and Throsby, 2012). Second, social media have the potential to allow the arts and art institutions to increase audiences and their level of engagement (Hume, 2011; Hausmann, 2012). Third, since museums’ digital presence is no longer confined to its website, controlling increasingly less of the information published about its collections, “making it necessary that they find ways to reinvent their strategies to capitalize on the opportunities and avoid the threats that the new environment brings” (Proctor, 2010, pp.36). The aim of this thesis is to examine how and why art museums engage with audiences on Instagram and to identify the factors that indicate an effective Instagram presence. This is achieved through the investigation of the official Instagram accounts of selected museums in the Netherlands and their social media strategies, by discovering patterns and characteristics of their