The Art Newspaper conducts an annual survey of the social media usage of 100 most visited museums in the world. They have typically taken a look at how museums have been using Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, Twitter/X over the last six years.
This year they found that a number of museums have lost followers on Twitter/X which they chalk up to people deleting their accounts on the platform rather than ceasing to follow the museums. One museum deleted their Twitter/X accounts while many other stopped posting on the platform.
At the same time it doesn’t appear many museums increased their presence on other platforms. While people with Instagram accounts automatically received a Threads account when Meta created the platform in 2023. However, museums which post content on Instagram either didn’t start posting on Threads or stopped posting there. Few of the top 100 museums started posting on Bluesky which was viewed as the prime alternative to Twitter/X by many who left that site.
The Art Newspaper staff didn’t make any observations about increases or decreases in usage of Facebook.
The social media platform with the biggest increase in the past year has been Tiktok. The article suggests the increase might have been more if the platform wasn’t continually under a ban threat in the United States.
After an initially slow adoption of TikTok as a platform for museums (only 21 of the top 100 most visited museums had TikTok accounts according to our 2023 data) it is becoming increasingly popular, with 56 of the 100 museums now owning accounts. Russian museums in particular are finding an audience on the Chinese-owned app, no doubt in part because the US platforms Facebook, Instagram and X are banned in the country.
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…Meanwhile, the Met’s incredible year on TikTok—gaining around 900,000 followers—will have been in vain if the US government goes ahead with its planned ban of the app, over concerns about national security, on 5 April.
