Stakeholder engagement via Facebook: an analysis of world's most popular museums

Over the last few years, Social Media (SM) have been emphasized as a means for organizations to foster stakeholder relationship with particular stress on their potential to promote community building and dialogic engagement with online audiences. These potential benefits of SM have been claimed also with respect to cultural organizations. However, the available research evidence on SM and museums suggests that museums still struggle to exploit these tools to their full potential. This paper adds further evidence on this issue by empirically investigating whether museums are using Facebook to promote follower engagement using a sample of top-attended museums worldwide. Results suggest that the frequency and content type of posts correlate to some extent with the degree of follower reactions. Nevertheless, sample museums predominantly use SM to publish promotional contents and as a result fail to achieve a true ‘dialogic’ follower engagement.