Holocaust memorialisation and social media. Investigating how memorials of former concentration camps use Facebook and Twitter

In historical memory education, digital technologies are gaining momentum and becoming influential in enhancing the general public's knowledge and understanding of historical events such as genocides and war atrocities. Holocaust remembrance centres and Holocaust museums have had a solid presence on the Internet for considerable time now, curating websites, mailing lists and other digital services. Social media are increasingly proving to be extremely valuable tools for allowing museums to engage with their public and for managing relations with past and future visitors. Indeed, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts and Instagram profiles have become significant components of the communication portfolios of various Holocaust organisations. Twitter mostly helps the public to keep up with the latest information and developments of the organisations concerned, while the Facebook pages of Holocaust victims and individual memorials are mainly set up for historical memorialisation. Despite growing use of these channels, very little research has been conducted to investigate the communication strategy of Holocaust organizations in social media, and a comprehensive overview of Holocaust memorial site presence on social media is still lacking. This study provides a preliminary analysis of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles of 23 memorials of former concentration camp located across Europe. The overarching aim is to investigate how these memorial organisations engage the public through social media, both at content page level and at relational level. The communication strategies of Facebook pages and Twitter profiles were analysed in terms of generated content, interactivity and popularity. A quantitative analysis was conducted by manual search and inspection of pages and profiles, combined with the application of social media data analysis platforms like LikeAlyzer, Fanpage Karma and Twitonomy. Results show that the majority (N=17) of the memorial organizations have a Facebook page, while only about a third (N=9) are active on Twitter. Moreover, great variance among the various social media services was observed, with many showing limited activity or low engagement levels. Indications for future research and limitations of the study are also reported.