From Digital to Physical: Museums' social media presence and its impact on visitors' loyalty and intention to visit online and onsite

Digitalization profoundly transformed the cultural sector offering a wide range of new opportunities that changed how cultural contents were traded, consumed, and valuated. Research on this topic began long ago, but it intensified with the increase in online museum visitors (Garcia- Madariaga et al., 2018). Many studies have focused on websites (Pallud and Straub, 2014), but thanks to the revolution brought by Web 2.0, social media are gaining more and more attention. Despite the growing interest (Blasco-Lopez et al., 2018), there still is little research considering the relationship between social media presence and initiatives, visitor loyalty, and intention to visit either museums' social media profiles or physical museums. This work advances previous studies by clarifying which features of the online visitor experience matter in directly influencing visitors' loyalty towards the museum and, in turn, the intention to revisit the social media or the museum. We tested our model on 128 respondents. The results show both the direct and indirect effects of social media in influencing the intention to visit museums both online and onsite. More importantly, the results expand our knowledge by showing the positive spillover effect of online presence on the offline visit.