Social Media Communication Strategies for Preserving Indonesia’s Cultural Heritage

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Nuria Astagini, whose focus is on the preservation of Indonesian cultural heritage in traditional dance through social media. Traditional dance is part of the country’s recognised cultural heritage, and offered as an extracurricular activity at school; this paper focusses on a dance studio in Depok, Ayodya Pala, that has been established for over 40 years and has developed a considerable social media presence.

The studio has a presence on facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, and uses this for the promotion of traditional dance (rather than for commercial purposes). The research examined its communications strategy through observations and interviews during February 2023.

It found a decreasing interest in traditional dance amongst younger audiences, yet the studio’s established reputation helps it work against this decline; while its steps public communication activities are not clearly formulated, it has a proactive strategy focussing on publishing information about the organisation to then public. It focusses on informative and persuasive messaging, including endorsements and testimonials.

Tactics for such communication include interpersonal communication to students and their parents, who are enrolled as opinion leaders and amplifiers for positive content about traditional dance; a pay-earn-own-share (PESO) social media approach is also employed. Such activities are not systematically evaluated by the studio’s management team, however.