The third edition of the international #MuseumWeek Twitter event that aims to promote museums and art has been a success.

This year MuseumWeek has ended this past Sunday, after 7 days, 7 themes and 7 hashtags: museums all over the world were offered the chance to join the event through a simple registration process and begin the tweeting journey. Born with the intent to raise awareness and promote art and culture through the most immediate social network, the MuseumWeek has proven to be a success with over 3500 participants from 75 countries. Each day of the week a different theme was pushed through the use of a different hashtag, to stimulate Twitter conversations and share culturally interesting facts and museum-related curiosities. This third edition of the event created a great sense of community and the numbers of affiliations have greatly increased compared to last year (affiliated museums were 2800): this figure proves the major influence that the virtual public has also on cultural topics. This is the new cultural challenge for the museums that must become 2.0: social networking is crucial to stimulate participation and attract new visitors and the #MuseumWeek success is concrete proof of this new way of living art.

SocialMeter Analysis monitored Twitter conversations from March 28th to April 3rd through the main hashtag #museumweek and the thematic ones #secretsmw, #peoplemw, #architecturemw, #heritagemw, #futuremw, #zoommw e #lovemw. Almost 275000 tweets were picked up on the subject and over 86000 unique users who joined the conversation. Tweet peaks of the different thematic hashtags were common around 2PM and 4PM every day. Among the most active users the official account @museumweek and two Italian museums @MuseoVirtualeTevere and @MuseoRioElba; the most mentioned profiles @britishmuseum e @MuseeLouvre.