Organizational microblogging for event marketing: a new approach to creative placemaking

Creative placemaking emphasizes the role of artists and cultural organizations in disseminating cultural products and services, and ultimately in promoting the city’s image. Over the past decade, we have witnessed a surge of cultural events in urban communities, where art and cultural spaces in the form of museums, art galleries, and exhibition halls have proliferated. Yet how to attract different audiences for event organizers to these events remains a challenge. In search of effective event marketing strategies, artists and cultural organizations increasingly rely on social media tools, such as Facebook, Twitter and Weibo (a Chinese microblog). Through an analysis of microblogging data collected through the Application Programming Interface (API) and web scraping, this paper evaluates the effectiveness of museums’ Weibo usage for attracting visitors in the city of Beijing. Applying a machine-learning algorithm and conducting a Kendall’s Tau test, we build a correlation between the degree of an account’s online activity and the frequency of onsite visits by the public. Our findings shed light on how organizations can use social media tools to more fully engage the public in social and cultural events.