2015 Theses Master's

Impact of Social Media Marketing on the Popularity of Museum Programs in China - Use Weibo as an Example

Duan, Bingruo

After the country's 12th five-year plan, in which cultural industry is defined as one of the pillar industries for the country, China is constructing new museums at an astonishing speed. However, combined with the museum mania is the lack of financial support, collection and most importantly, visitors, among new museums. Thus, how to increase the popularity became a challenge for these museums. With the booming of social media, many museums witnessed the success of social media marketing done by enterprises from many other industries. Therefore, a lot of museums opened their social media account, aiming to gain popularity. By collecting and analyzing data directly from Sina Weibo (Microblog), one of the most popular social media platforms in China, the thesis will explore the effect of Weibo marketing for museums to gain popularity. With the help of API (Application Programming Interface), web scraping and machine learning, it is possible to see directly into the social media data and find out the answer by data-mining methodology.