Social Networks and Cultural Institutions: Breaking the Strategic Deadlock

Local authorities are massively investing in their presence on social networks without questioning the relevance of this approach, and are generally losing resources in futile endeavors. Yet magnificent projects can be built there.

The preliminary question: why be present?

Before any reflection on the modalities of digital presence, a fundamental question deserves to be asked: for what reasons should a cultural institution be active on social networks? The usual answers—raising awareness of programming, attracting new audiences, communicating about events—come up against the recurring observation that presence on these platforms does not generate measurable additional attendance. The professionals questioned acknowledge this themselves.

The situation becomes paradoxical when venues are full. If the occupancy objective is achieved by other means, what exactly are we seeking through our presence in these digital spaces? The often-formulated answer, “to exist,” reveals a form of social injunction rather than a thoughtful strategy. This pressure for digital existence, well analyzed by sociologist Dominique Cardon in her book Culture numérique (2019), stems more from conformity to the norms of platform capitalism than from reflection on the missions of cultural public service.

It would be possible to make a radical choice: not to be there. The newspaper Le Canard enchaîné has demonstrated that a media outlet can thrive without a website or social media presence. This deliberate choice, far from being a handicap, builds a strong and distinctive identity. For a cultural institution, giving up digital dispersion could free up time and resources for more substantial actions. The question is not whether to be present, but what we want to accomplish and whether social networks are the appropriate tool to achieve it.

Staff exposure: an institutional blind spot

The current trend pushes to “embody” institutional communication by highlighting identified individuals rather than abstract logos. Platform algorithms indeed favor content carried by human faces. Community managers thus find themselves on camera, speaking on behalf of their local authority in short, dynamic formats. This evolution, while responding to platform logic, raises questions that institutions have not yet truly addressed.

What happens when an exposed staff member becomes the target of virulent criticism, harassment, or bashing? Cases already exist: civil servants are insulted, treated in degrading ways because they spoke on behalf of their institution. Yet no legal framework, no institutional doctrine provides for this situation. Staff members are exposed without protection, without support, without recognition of this risk in their job description. Michel Lallement, in L’Âge du faire (2015), had already pointed out the tension between personal commitment and institutional framework in new forms of work.

This situation calls for the creation of an explicit protective framework. Local authorities that encourage their staff to expose themselves should guarantee them legal support in case of problems, training in managing conflictual situations online, and recognition of this risk-taking in professional evaluation. As long as this framework does not exist, it is problematic to push staff members to personally expose themselves in the name of a communication strategy whose relevance itself remains to be demonstrated.

The invisible time of digital work

Producing content for social networks is time-consuming. Creating a quality video, even a short one, requires preparation, filming, editing, writing. For content to work on these platforms, it must be polished, rhythmic, adapted to the specific codes of each network. These skills cannot be improvised and the corresponding tasks take considerable time.

Yet this time is generally not taken into account in work organization. Mediators, communication officers, field staff are asked to produce this content “in addition to” their usual missions. This invisibilization of digital work, well described by Antonio Casilli in En attendant les robots (2019), creates additional mental load and degrades the conditions for carrying out other missions. It’s absurd: we devote time to activities whose impact we don’t measure, to the detriment of activities whose value we know.

A coherent policy would suppose either recognizing this working time, by explicitly integrating it into job descriptions with corresponding resources, or reducing digital ambitions to a level compatible with available resources. The worst situation is one where contradictory injunctions are maintained: be present everywhere, produce quality content, without dedicated resources or recognized time.

Training differently: learning from content creators

The training offered to cultural staff in audiovisual production often remains anchored in methods inherited from cinema or television: heavy equipment, complex processes, multiple validation chains. These approaches, adapted to traditional professional production, are ill-suited to the requirements of social networks which favor reactivity, authenticity and technical lightness.

Content creators who succeed on these platforms have developed radically different methods: lightweight high-quality equipment, simplified workflows, formats adapted to mobile uses. A recent smartphone, a lavalier microphone, a stabilizer and a few applications are enough to produce content of excellent technical quality. These skills, empirically built by daily practitioners of platforms, are not, or are still very little, taught in traditional professional training.

If cultural institutions decide to engage on social networks, they would benefit from training their staff with experienced content creators rather than with traditional audiovisual professionals. This inversion of legitimacies is not trivial: it presupposes recognizing that amateurs, in the etymological sense of those who love and practice, possess expertise that institutional professionals do not have. This is a first step toward the logic of horizontality that social networks demand.

TikTok: refusal as a political choice

Some local authorities have chosen not to be present on TikTok, citing the “toxicity” of the algorithm or the Chinese origin of the platform. This choice, presented as a precaution, deserves to be questioned. TikTok is today the most powerful social network in terms of cultural dissemination and the most innovative in its content discovery mechanisms and in the position it gives its users, because it is as much a creation tool as a distribution tool, which makes it absolutely unique. Its algorithm, far from being a simple addiction machine, constitutes an unprecedented tool for cultural democracy: it allows quality content, regardless of its author’s notoriety, to reach considerable audiences.

The security argument sometimes masks a form of cultural conservatism. What disturbs about TikTok may not be so much its algorithm as the freedom of expression it permits and the cultural forms that develop there. Leading cultural institutions—the Grand Palais, the TNB, the Paris Opera—have chosen to be present there, recognizing that this is where tomorrow’s cultural practices are being built.

Refusing to be on TikTok can be a deliberate choice, but one must then accept its consequences: cutting oneself off from the youngest audiences most inclined to constructive connections, giving up understanding emerging cultural forms, maintaining generational insularity. For cultural institutions whose vocation is to prepare the future, this position of avoidance constitutes a strategic paradox. Sociologist Yves Citton, in L’Écologie de l’attention (2014), reminded us that attention is the scarce resource of our time. Turning away from places where this attention is being built amounts to voluntarily marginalizing oneself. And other platforms, from Facebook to Instagram, WhatsApp or even LinkedIn, are no more virtuous than TikTok, far from it.

Supporting audience expression rather than communicating

The real value that cultural institutions can bring to social networks does not lie in their own speaking out, but in the support they can offer to citizen expression. A spectator who shares their concert experience reaches their network with an efficiency incomparable to that of institutional communication. Peer recommendation, as shown by Pierre-Jean Benghozi in his work on cultural economics, exerts an influence ten times greater than that of institutional messages.

Cultural institutions have exceptional resources: spaces, technical equipment, artistic skills, access to works and artists. Rather than using these resources to produce their own communication, they could make them available to citizen content creators. Offering spectators the opportunity to film in professional conditions, providing the expertise of a lighting technician, organizing privileged meetings with artists: these resources would enable people to create content of much better quality than they could do alone. Everyone would benefit, in very large proportions.

This reversal of perspective fully aligns with the logic of cultural rights as defined by the Fribourg Declaration (2007): the right to participate in cultural life includes the right to express oneself and create. By supporting audience expression, cultural institutions would fulfill their mission of emancipation much better than by adding their institutional voice to the ambient noise of platforms.

Towards an institutional digital doctrine

The absence of a clear doctrine on the use of social networks by public agents creates a problematic gray area. Some are encouraged to speak out, others are called to order. Some content is valued, others deemed inappropriate without explicit criteria. This uncertainty generates self-censorship and prevents creative risk-taking, which is the key to impact. This is also closely linked to the fact that social networks fall in the vast majority of cases under the responsibility of communication departments, when their power lies in mediation. Therefore, the appropriate people are not responsible for them in the organizational chart of responsibilities. Or else communication departments would need to be given much more control over the cultural and artistic content produced by the institution, and this content should be signed by the people who create it as creations. This also respects the cultural rights of public servants.

An institutional digital doctrine should therefore clarify several points: what can be said and what cannot, the protections offered to staff who speak out, procedures in case of problems, recognition of time devoted to these activities, training offered, objectives pursued and success indicators. This doctrine should not be restrictive but enabling: it should allow staff to engage with full knowledge rather than keeping them in uncertainty.

This clarification is all the more urgent as other digital projects are opening up, particularly around artificial intelligence. The same questions will arise: what uses are authorized, what protections are guaranteed, what objectives are pursued? Building a coherent doctrine on social networks will prepare institutions to approach new challenges with more serenity.

What a real strategy would look like

A digital strategy worthy of the name for a cultural institution should start from a simple question: what do we want to accomplish that we could not accomplish otherwise?

• If the answer is “nothing in particular,” the conclusion is clear: better not to be there, or to be there minimally, rather than dispersing resources without a clear objective.
• If the goal is to reach new audiences, then the strategy must be based on what actually works on these platforms: peer recommendation, embodiment by identified individuals, thematic specialization. This means giving up classic institutional communication to invest in supporting creator audiences, in making resources available, in training protected and recognized ambassador-agents.
• If the goal is to build a memory, a living archive of the cultural life of the place, then the institutional website remains the most suitable tool: sustainable, controlled, searchable. Social networks can then serve as occasional relays to this substantive content, without claiming to replace it.
• And the most exciting objective is to invest in these digital spaces as spaces for mediation, creation, reinvention of relationships with audiences, inventing complementarities in echo to on-site offerings.

In all cases, a strategy presupposes deliberate choices, dedicated resources, success indicators and regular evaluation. The opposite of what is mostly practiced today: a default presence, without identified resources, without measurable objectives, through simple conformity to a social norm that has nothing to do with cultural policy.

For strategic humility

Social networks are not communication spaces but spaces for relationships between people. This obvious fact, which the platforms themselves constantly emphasize through their algorithms that favor interpersonal engagement, remains difficult to integrate for institutions accustomed to broadcasting messages vertically.

Strategic humility would consist in recognizing that cultural institutions have no vocation to occupy these spaces in the same way as natural persons. Their role could be to remain in the background of the digital scene to better equip those who express themselves there: provide resources, support practices, protect exposed individuals, document experiences.

This position of facilitator rather than communicator is part of the broader movement of transformation in the cultural sector: moving from a logic of prescription to a logic of support, from a dominating posture to a cooperative posture, from democratization through supply to democracy through participation. Social networks, by their very nature, compel us to this evolution. It would be time to stop resisting them and start understanding them.