Visitors to the Australian Museum use social media

  • Author(s)
    Lynda Kelly
  • Category
    Museullaneous
  • Published
    19 March 2010
  • Read time
    2 minutes

According to our latest visitor research conducted in January 2010, 57% of people that visited the Museum used a social networking site in the previous six months.

Over January 2010 we surveyed 174 visitors to the Australian Museum and asked them about the kinds of online activities undertaken in the previous six months and the results are quite interesting:

  • 71% watched a video on YouTube
  • 64% looked at/added to an online encyclopaedia such as Wikipedia
  • 57% used a social networking site like MySpace, Facebook, Bebo
  • 53% read customer ratings/reviews
  • 44% read a blog
  • 40% listened to a podcast
  • 36% uploaded a photo to website such as Flickr
  • 34% used a wiki
  • 25% added a rating/review to a website
  • 25% participated in a discussion board/forum
  • 16% added video/audio they created to a website
  • 15% published their own webpage
  • 14% used Twitter
  • 13% made a comment on a blog

These results are similar to another study we conducted in 2007 asking Australians what they were doing online (using the same categories as above). In that study we found that museum / gallery visitors participated at higher levels across all activities. Apart from using social networking sites, statistical tests revealed that these differences were highly significant across all categories. More about that study can be found here.

Taken together these findings suggested that, not only do those who visit museums participate in more online activities, they also engage in activities that are participatory and two-way, such as posting and reading customer reviews and using social networking sites.

I’ll be doing more sampling over April/May so will keep you pos