  This paper explores the association between brand importance and growth in
museum visitors. We analyzed 10 years of online forum discussions and applied
the Semantic Brand Score (SBS) to assess the brand importance of five European
Museums. Our Naive Bayes and regression models indicate that variations in the
combined dimensions of the SBS (prevalence, diversity and connectivity) are
aligned with changes in museum visitors. Results suggest that, in order to
attract more visitors, museum brand managers should focus on increasing the
volume of online posting and the richness of information generated by users
around the brand, rather than controlling for the posts' overall positivity or
negativity.
