Top European Museums on Twitter

Recently, museums worldwide started to use social media and have developed initiatives to provide widespread access to museum information resource, engage audiences and attract more visitors. Twitter, the most popular microblogging platform, allows museums to spread small time-sensitive amounts of information and transform audiences from passive observers into active participators. However, little research effort has been devoted at investigating the use of Twitter by museums. The paper aims to fill this gap and records the top-60 European museums and their Twitter accounts. Eleven Twitter performance indexes are used to describe the activity and performance of these accounts. Descriptive statistics, Principal Components Analysis and correlational analysis reveal that there is a significant differentiation among museums regarding Twitter performance. Performance of the accounts is described using three principal components: networking, tweeting activity, time that the account is active and involvement. A group of the more active museums on Twitter is constructed. Partially, Twitter performance is in accordance with museums popularity and ranking, while there are a significant proportion of museums which do not use Twitter. Implications and suggestions are provided for the museums to use Twitter as a marketing and promotion channel, especially for the museums which are placed lower within the ranking list.