An Analysis of Social Media Strategies at Melbourne Museum

This report examines the social media strategies employed by the Melbourne Museum, focusing on their use of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to engage with visitors and promote their offerings. The analysis highlights the museum's adaptation to digital marketing trends, emphasizing the shift towards interactive and online communication to meet consumer expectations. The report references the Social Impact Theory and discusses the museum's approach to leveraging social media platforms to connect with both local and international audiences, attracting visitors and promoting events. The report also explores segmentation strategies, targeting specific demographics, and the effectiveness of their campaigns in motivating consumers. The study references various sources to provide insights into the museum's marketing efforts, emphasizing its success in using social media to enhance visitor experiences and market its exhibits.

Running head: SOCIAL MEDIA
Social Media:
Melbourne Museum
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note

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Answer 2:
Due to the recent trend of the interactive and digital marketing strategies, the expectations
of the consumers from different organizations have changed. Therefore, the important museums
in Australia are thinking of following the fad of digitization to align with the commercial
environment. They are moving slowly to transform into the form of digital communication
strategies, but rapidly coping up with the commercial sectors. According to Brown (2016), most
of the significant museums in Australia have adopted the social media strategies such as smart
phone applications, audio and video podcast to communicate with the consumers. The Social
Impact Theory can be used in this respect as it considers the three significant factors of strength,
immediacy and number. Social media has provided strength among the museum and the visitors;
target audience can be immediately connected through mobile device; provides large opportunity
to the museum to target visitors. All the museums, either local or national, have successfully
made their presence stronger in the online media.
From studying Melbourne museum’s website, the management of the museum has
selected the three social media platforms of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to communicate
with their various customer strengths (“Melbourne Museum” 2018).Facebook is considered as
the biggest social media network among the marketers therefore customers will be easily
attracted to the museum by checking the updates in their Facebook account. Moreover, Facebook
has the largest number of monthly active users, which is around 2 billion. It is among the first
social media platforms to cross 1 billion users. Therefore, it is the most appropriate platform to
reach out to the wider range of visitors on a global network. (Tuten and Solomon 2015)
Twitter is another popular platform, which was used by Melbourne museum to reach out
to the target audience. It helped the museum authority to conduct business by creating easy
communication plans with the target visitors by word of mouth, developing brand awareness or
acting as brand ambassadors. They have used the keyword system of Twitter to provide the
visitors with the accessibility to their collections, guiding them and giving reference information
(Dijkmans, Kerhof and Beukeboom 2015).
Instagram was used by the museum authority to reach the target market by creating
Instagram advertisement. It helped them in enhancing their unreached customer base. Melbourne
museum has followed similar strategies of Victoria museum. They did not use other social
media platforms such as G+, Youtube, Pinterest, Snapchat or LinkedIn as those were not
effective in reaching the public who will be interested to know about Australian museums.
Therefore, they made the correct selection of social media platforms and did not miss out
anything (Lehman and Roach 2011).
Coleman and Nankervis(2015) have stated that the prominent museums of Australia are
Powerhouse Museum, Australian museum, Museum of Contemporary Art and the Art Gallery of
NSW. It is an important fact that the museums have their own role to play for the betterment of
society. Apart from preserving the valuable artifacts, they are responsible for conducting
research and learning process in terms of entertainment and leisure facilities. This has resulted in
the development of different target markets for the museums with different needs and demands.
Their response to communication messages also vary. Therefore, there is an emerging issue of

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communicating with the contemporary consumers by drawing parity with their choice to that of
traditional artifacts (Lehman and Roach 2011).
According to Rowan et al. (2016)Melbourne has a convincing as well as creative and
cultural business. This place has attracted around 10 million local and foreign visitors in the year
2015. The Melbourne museum has planned to implement digital strategies and focused mainly
on the children. With respect to digitization, they have made a strong web presence to interact
with the consumers, attract them for visiting the museum and enjoy the traditional collection.
They have made an advanced use of social media via blogs, sites and wiki pages to spread their
opinions, views and images. It has been effective in seeking a large amount of attention from the
consumers,which helped them in implementing new forms of adaptation in the functioning of the
museum. This museum had initially introduced a new form of browsing and searching around a
decade ago where the consumers could easily seek from the collection of databaseand enhance
the usage.In this way, social media or the new media has helped the museums by promoting their
events through different applications of iPhone, Blackberry and other such devices (Ryan 2017).
Lehman and Roach (2011) has stated that there is a strategic reason for the organizations
to use all kinds of social media platforms. This is because the consumersegmentation is done
based on their age, location and gender. It also depends on the social media marketers to observe
the behavior of the consumers and study their preferences to provide the best possible
experience. It was found out by interviewing the museum authorities that they intend to attract
those consumers who have already visited Melbourne rather than the potentially new consumers.
This is a part of their social media strategy and the Melbourne museum has been successful in
this way in marketing their products.A study on the tourists has highlighted that most of the
visitors in Melbourne museum comes from UK, USA, New Zealand and Germany (Rowan et al.
2016). The social media marketers has used blogs to connect to the foreign tourists and social
media pages such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to connect to the local people. There will
be no bar on gender but in terms of age, the young were targeted with the social media
promotion. The not- so- socially- active visitors were targeted with the company websites and
pages, which could be translated to different languages.
The social media marketers of the Melbourne museum were successful in motivating the
consumers through their strategies as the tourists have said that they visit the place for enjoying
the exhibition of the venue. The underlying strategy of using all the available social media
platforms proved to be effective as the tourists have marked the place as ‘a must visit’. However,
there is still scope for the museum authorities to work on their marketing and communication
strategies. As they have already initiated special events, exhibition, talk shows, they can promote
these events by inviting the customers on their social media profiles. It will be an efficient form
of communicating with the consumers (Ryan 2017).

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