doxa.comunicación | 30, pp. 309-330 | 313

January-june of 2020

Emelina Galarza Fernández, Eduardo Villena Alarcón and Aimiris Sosa Valcarcel

ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978

may be taking place about itself and have an active presence on those platforms where its public participates, exchanges opinions or generates the content of interest for the museum”.

Today, online social networks are the spaces par excellence where this communication takes place in real-time, posses-sing the production, distribution reach, and capacity to influence at a transnational level. They are “low-cost management platforms with viral and global potential, and their common foundation is to make communication easy and accessible” (Quintana, Sosa & Castillo, 2018: 249).

Even though these characteristics are common to the management of personal, organisational and company profiles, etc., De las Heras, Ruiz and Paniagua (2018: 94) state that in the case of institutions’ social networks we must also consider their vocation to public service “in which effective communication and active listening, and transparency must prevail, helping the institution to show itself as it is, the quality of the service and co-responsibility”.

The successful management of these platforms requires the professional activity often carried out by departments and areas dedicated to institutional communication, to communicate these centres’ identity and brand to the public and to try to make their cultural offerings a tourist attraction too (Gershon, 2016; Chic, 2018). This is possible through the use of several tools that, depending on the specific characteristics of each social network, make it possible to satisfy the digi-tal community of users’ specific communication needs, who, in this case, are interested in some information about the museums.

In this sense, the physical barriers that divide large and small museums due to location or size are less significant (Cano & Rostoll, 2018). The challenge is reduced to managing effective communication, using the most advanced trends in digi-talisation to obtain benefits and achieve objectives according to organisational needs, the public’s motivational changes, growing competition, and the flexibility and personalisation of tourist activities (Beltrán, Parra & Padilla, 2017). In parti-cular, those activities are carried out in less global areas, as is the case of those by museums in Malaga.

2.1. Malaga, city of museums

Malaga has attracted tourists since time immemorial; however, the reason for tourist attraction to the city has varied in recent years. Barrera and Meethan (2014) state that the first city guides focused on the churches and monuments, and the climate. It was not until 1928 that Malaga was first associated with Pablo Picasso. This connection perpetuated until it became a vital part of the city’s economic strategies, which has been reflected in tourist plans since 2006. In 2006 the need to create a museum dedicated to the figure of the painter was already apparent.

Since then, Malaga has experienced a tourist transformation and rapid growth, which has made it an authentic city of museums. Malaga has a total of 40 museums, most of which are concentrated in the historic centre, it is one of the cities with the highest density of museums in its old town (The Department of Tourism of the City of Malaga, 2016).

This is corroborated by the Tourism Burden Index which, in terms of the World Tourism Organization, corresponds to the maximum number of people that can visit a tourist destination at the same time, without destroying the physical, econo-mic, socio-cultural environment, or a decrease in the quality of visitor satisfaction,