The use of social media by museums has attracted the attention of scholars and researchers seeking to understand the potentialities of social media for the museum sector, the types of engagement promoted through social media platforms, and/or people’s perceptions, preferences and experiences. However, current methods for evaluating and assessing activity on museum social media based on metrics and analytics provided by the social platforms fail to capture the context, the specificities and the complexity of how communication unfolds. This paper presents the in-depth, mixed-methods research approach adopted in the study, which utilized both quantitative and qualitative data to examine the experiences of social media users interacting with museums on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter (now known as X).