A Comperative Study of Instagram Pages of Two Leading Turkish Museums: Topkapı Museum and Sakıp Sabancı Museum

Abstract

As the competition between the museums increase, tools like digital marketing are used to attract the stakeholders and increase museum attendance. By their nature, museums cannot be managed like regular consumer or industrial brands but there are areas where strategic moves can be made such as social communication. An important tool in this area is the social media where different means exist including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Museums thrive to attract visitors and stay close to other stakeholders using social media. Playing a major role in tourism markets as well as cultural and educational areas, museums follow the developments in social media and adapt to changing environments. Different methods exist for the classification of museums and for this study institutional classification of museums, namely State versus Private museums were considered and compared. In Turkey, as Topkapı Museum is one of the most visited museums among state museums, whereas Sakıp Sabancı Museum is among the most visited private ones, Instagram pages of these museums were taken into consideration. This study analyzes @topkapi_sarayi and @sakipsabancimuzesi Instagram pages, compares them in terms of number of followers, posts, topics, views/likes, comments and other content. The analysis is made for the whole year 2021 coverage of each page. Content analysis technique has been applied as the research technique for the study. The data has been analysed and recorded between January 03, 2022 and January 20, 2022. As of the end of the recording period, Sakıp Sabancı Museum has approximately 196.000 followers versus Topkapı Museum has approximately 37.100 followers. The results indicate that Sakıp Sabancı Museum is much more active in terms of number of posts (337 versus 68 posts) and variety of topics shared (24 versus 8). Thus the result is reflected in the total number of Views/Likes/Comments; that is 570.855 Views/Likes and 2872 Comments for Sakıp Sabancı Museum and 137.052 Views/Likes and 674 Comments for Topkapı Museum. The study also points out some suggestions to improve Instagram Page quality, content and attract new followers for the museums. Keywords: Museum, Social media, Instagram, @topkapi_sarayi, @sakipsabancimuzesi