“I ♥ Skagens Museum”: Patterns of Interaction in the Institutional Facebook Communication of Museums

Facebook has often been hailed for affording participation and thus for representing
an opportunity for institutions to interact with the public. However, research
concerning how institutions are actualizing this communicative opportunity is still
scarce. In this article, we seek to address this gap by investigating empirically
how one type of institution, namely museums, and their Facebook followers,
actually communicate. Our approach is innovative in combining analytical tools
from speech act theory and Conversation Analysis (CA) to a corpus of activities
from the Facebook pages of nine Danish museums of different types and sizes
collected during eight consecutive weeks in 2013. This approach enables us
to both investigate communicative actions as isolated speech acts and the
micromechanics of the interaction that potentially arise from these actions. Our
findings indicate that certain kinds of speech act are used more than others and
that certain speech acts lead to more interaction than others. By analyzing a fairly
standard example of museum/follower interaction, we show how different kinds
of micro-conversational dynamics play out. In light of this analysis, we ask what
modes of participation the interaction affords and we discuss the implications of
our findings for recent debates about how museums can adapt to the participatory
paradigm underlying institutional Facebook communication.