Virtual Museums and social networks

In the last decade, virtual museums emerged, becoming a continuous trend for museums that want to innovate, renew and involve their visitors. The European Network of Virtual Museums (V-MUST.NET) in its four years analysis (2011-2014) indicated and tested potentially interesting digital applications, for the future of museums. How these involving narrative applications should be treated and how they should be communicated? From the report recently presented by Civita about museum and social media, emerged that 9 million of people in Italy use social networks to get informed about art and culture. Therefore it seems an important direction to follow for public institutions and museums, to inform people about their activities. What museums and other institutions are currently doing in this direction? How can they fully benefit from social media? Virtual museums can be considered as museums and use the same strategies? In order to answer to those questions, we have started to analyse the interaction between Virtual Museums and institutions, starting with those institutions that participated to the Museum Week (#MuseumWeek). We have, at the same time, promoted a Virtual Museum (The Virtual Museum of the Tiber Valley) during the Museum Week 2016. The results of these activities and tests are presented.