Facebook live tour of the National Gallery
August 15 2016
Picture: Facebook/National Gallery
Here's an interesting thing - the National Gallery hosted a 'live' tour of their current Painters Paintings exhibition on Facebook last week, and very good it was too: you can watch it here. The picture featured above is the Van Dyck self-portrait I discovered some years ago (which I might have mentioned just a few times already, sorry).
The tour was a fairly simple production, with a low-res, unlit camera following 'Curatorial Assistant Allison' (actually Allison Goudie) around the exhibition. But I was amazed and impressed to see that it has been seen so far by over 21,000 people. This is far more people than would normally click to see a National Gallery video on You Tube (which are more slickly produced).
Is Facebook the future for museum videos and digital marketing like this? I'm afraid I'm not on Facebook, so I don't know enough to suggest an answer (and it's abore that Facebook is so controlling about content - I can't for example embed the National Gallery's footage onto this site, like I can with You Tube videos). But just think what the National Gallery could achieve if they did more online tours like this, but actually used some proper equipment (like a light).
