The Theatre Bay Area commissioned this study - The Tangled Web: Social Media in the Arts and it provides a snapshot as to how the arts and the cultural sector are using social media. Some of the highlights (summarized by Thomas Cott, of YouCottMail) of what they found were:
Arts organizations in the study utilize over 20 networking platforms.
The average arts organization is active on three social networks (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) and uploads 66 new pieces of content each month.
Facebook Pages updated multiple times per day, [with] a customized URL and [featuring] a custom Welcome tab have more fans, who interact more often, than those who do not.
Organizations that tweet more than 4 times per day and do not replicate Facebook content on their Twitter feed have more followers and a higher rate of engagement than others.
Venue pages on Yelp and Foursquare that have been claimed by an organization have more user engagement than those that have not.
Arts organizations [which] use a custom URL and a custom template for their blog have more engagement than those who do not, but overall blogs offer a very low rate of engagement regardless of format, structure or frequency.
Depth verses breath is a stronger indicator of success in social media.
What I found to be most interesting about this study is its support of social media’s role as a way to engage audience members and to create dialogue and connections beyond the performance or gallery visit. In this case, for the arts, social media is not a path to selling more tickets or increasing income directly. Is this the case for all organizations, even for-profit?
1 comment:
I think this is a very important study. Especially coming from a general belief that arts organization are NOT utilizing enough social media channels. It would be interesting to know whether these institutions are using those channels also to influence their programming or artistic choices. Whether the posts reflect what the audience is interested in? What the audience wants?
Reading your post I also thought of La Placa Cohen's recent study on Cultural Audiences "Culture Track" - http://www.laplacacohen.com/culturetrack/
Which is the 5th installment of an ongoing national research study of the attitudes and behaviors of cultural audiences, examining trends in attendance at visual and performing arts events and the motivators and barriers that affect participation.
Perhaps if you examine the trends emerging in "Culture Track", one of them being social media engagement, together with the use of social media by organizations, it would be a very useful tool for cultural organization in terms of SEO or identifying keywords etc.
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