The first few weeks of marketing have been very successful. As something I’ve never really done before, I was apprehensive about the time management side, understanding algorithms, and gaining a decent following. However, what these past few weeks have proved is, it’s a lot more fun than I was expecting!
So what have we been getting up to?
Our Facebook page is by far the social media account that our audience is interacting with the most. We have over 300 likes, and our posts are reaching over 5,000 people. It has been proven that videos are the most powerful marketing tool on Facebook, so we’ve been uploading little snippet videos from rehearsals regularly, a lot of the time using the ‘Boomerang’ app. Boomerang records videos on a four second loop, making the image appear to go backwards and forwards – it’s a great little way of previewing our work without giving too much away, and they’re fun to watch!
Since videos are such a great way to connect with our audience, we decided to create a video advert on Facebook which will be pushed out to a select audience of our choosing (18-50 year olds). We used a Boomerang video from a movement rehearsal, and within an hour of the advert going live, it had already reached 80 people outside the organic audience (people who like our page and their friends).
Something we have also been doing on our Facebook page is introducing our company members individually to get a better connection with an audience, allowing them to know a little bit about each of us. We’ve been posting these daily between 13:00-14:00, the peak hours for Facebook use in the week as people at work are often on their lunch breaks and want to catch up with social media.
Within this, we tell our viewers three things each company member loves the most, keeping the theme of our upcoming show, love, in people’s minds. It also emphasizes people as individuals and what sets each other apart, something deeply rooted in our company manifesto.
Something else that is happening on our Facebook page is the promo for our first fundraising event! We are holding a quiz all about love on the 7th March and have gained a lot of interest through promoting the quiz and the prizes to our Facebook followers.
The event information reads:
The Pin Hinge Collective presents
The Quiz of Love!
Think you know about love? Reckon you know your rom-coms from your tear-jerkers? Bet you’re clued up on your famous couples? Can you REALLY remember the lyrics to that cheesy 80s ballad you always attempt?
Test your trivia at The Swan with some VERY exciting prizes to be won, including
PAINTBALLING FOR 4 as the GRAND PRIZE!
There will also be a raffle for the chance to win a romantic stay in a B&B for two lucky people!
£2 to play
Teams of no more than 4!
All proceeds go towards our fundraising campaign for our new show.
Details of our company and show can be found at:
facebook.com/thepinhingecollective
twitter.com/pinhingetheatre
thepinhingecollective.wordpress.com
We’d love you to be there!
This event has been viewed by 269 people and reached a total of 1.8k, but of course due to venue size this large number would not be possible…
We’re aiming to have around 60-70 people attend and to hopefully achieve this, we’re going to do a countdown to our event as a reminder, and push the event through sharing and Facebook advertising.
Instagram has also proved a popular tool, however not so much so as Facebook. Far fewer people use Instagram than Facebook so the difference in numbers isn’t surprising, as well as Instagram being far less interactive and familiar to use than Facebook. However, we post Instagram updates regularly, focusing on mainly photographic material than videos, although Boomerang videos are also now incorporated into Instagram so we do tend to replicate relevant videos on there as well as Facebook.
Since our show will be very visual, we understand that our Instagram use will develop as the show does, and in turn, our audience engagement will increase. However, the engagement we’ve been getting so far is excellent, we’ve been getting lots of likes on our photos and the correlation between Instagram likes and Facebook likes is interesting to watch, as people who like one page often go and visit the other.
Our Twitter experience has been somewhat different from Facebook and Instagram. We’ve found it hard to establish a following due to the large amount of ‘traffic’ on Twitter and accounts/tweets getting lost in the masses. I believe the next way to get around this is promoting our Twitter account on Facebook to make people more aware of it, and engaging with other theatre companies and venues in order to make a connection!