Facebook has quickly become the most popular social network site (SNS). The site is hailed for affording dialogue and interaction and thus represents a golden opportunity for museums to engage with the public. Many museums have seized this opportunity with varying degrees of success in terms of the quality and quantity of the interaction achieved.
Previous research into interaction on Facebook has primarily emphasized identity and self-representation in relation to interpersonal communication. We wish to expand this body of research by focusing on the communicative actions and patterns in institutional communication as it occurs on the Facebook walls of Danish museums.
We do this by applying a tailored version of Conversation Analysis (CA) to a corpus of activities from the Facebook wall of nine museums of different type and size collected during four consecutive weeks. This model enables us to identify the types of communicative actions initiated by the museums and how users respond to these actions.
We argue that the communicative actions display a considerable variety ranging from more traditional institutional online communication to more interpersonal genres. Achieving interaction is not easily done and museums must learn to adapt to interpersonal patterns of communication in order to succeed. We discuss why some communicative actions seem to generate more interaction than others and point to some implications for further practice in and research about institutional communication of museums on Facebook.
