Gallerie degli Uffizi

About the practice

The creation of content for the Tik Tok account has involved a team of different figures from the museum.

In particular in this team there is an art historian, a philosopher, and people with different kind of education. It is necessary to have experts on the content to create content about the collection, but to make this a successful project other competences (e.g., communication) are needed. It is interesting also to notice that the team doesn’t comprise people that were experts of communication before the start of the project or had a specific education on it.

As the goal was to show to young people that art can be fun, the approach used is emotional; the content isn’t meant to be didactic but wants to attract the interest of the public to new content. Therefore, the language used has been adapted to the medium; it uses memes, irony, follows the trends of the moment.

About the institution

The Uffizi Galleries have developed a strong social media campaign during the first months of lockdown, and in particular on the social media TikTok, where the account @uffizigalleries has doubled the number of young visitors by creating content online following the unwritten communication rules of this tool (e.g., use of irony and memes).

Context

The director of the museum proposed the idea of creating a social account on TikTok before the start of the pandemic in 2020, it was already in discussion the idea of setting it up. The outbreak of Covid has accelerated this process.

Location

Florence, Tuscany region, Italy

Success factors

Irony, young, engaging

Target audience

This best practice is addressed to the common TikTok users (specifically, for people under 25 years old)

Sustainability

The project is easily replicable also in smaller realities, considering that it doesn’t require any specific technology or expertise (what are needed are images with high resolution and editing apps like InShot), in particular since the app privileges non-professional content.

Digital tools

The technological tools used are very common and easy to use: the content for TikTok has been created using the app InShot, accessible by every smartphone.

Funding

The project has been created only with internal financing

Plans

To show to young people that it is possible to have fun with art - adjustment to new users of TikTok and its trends