Having returned from vacation, I’m spending more time digging through data from this year’s Saskatchewan Jazz Festival, and reflecting upon what lessons I can glean from my marketing campaign. Besides the introduction of our iPhone and Android app, one of the most interesting changes this year was the amount of buzz and activity on Twitter.
In past years, I feel that Saskatchewan lacked a critical mass of Twitter users, and our involvement on the social network wasn’t particularly fruitful. This year, however, the festival’s follower count jumped, people were tweeting about the shows, and we successfully used Twitter to engage the public, promote our events, and listen to what people were saying about us.
Looking back on the campaign, there are many takeaways from the festival’s activity on Twitter, but I want to highlight three that I thought would be most helpful for other arts organizations.
1. Your artists are cooler than you, so get them involved
Sure, your audience enjoys tweeting with you, but you know as well as I do that the artist is the main attraction both on and offline. Get them tweeting about your event, and you’ll really drive audience interest. Having artists like Tegan and Sara, De La Soul, and Macy Gray tweet about this year’s festival created buzz, drove ticket sales, and helped build and shape our brand. Find the creative talent behind your organization, whether that’s in-house or not, and engage them.
2. Scheduling tweets frees you to truly engage
With over 150 events in our schedule this year, I originally feared that I’d be too busy tweeting about upcoming shows to actively engage and response to our followers. I learned that by scheduling the bulk of our promotional tweets ahead of time (e.g. “Don’t miss bass virtuoso Christian McBride at the Broadway Theatre tonight at 7pm!”), I was able to focus on engaging festivalgoers, responding to questions, tweeting photos, and doing last-minute ticket giveaways.
3. It’s hard to measure buzz, but Twitter can help
No matter how often people tell you that there’s plenty of buzz about your event, it can be hard to believe them. Unless you have connections with the intelligence community, you simply can’t listen to others’ conversations — at least not the analog ones.
You can, however, get a taste of what your community is saying by listening on Twitter. Make a list of keywords related to your organization or even, and search for them within Twitter. I use Hootsuite to easily monitor a bunch of keywords on a daily basis. While only a fraction of those talking about your organization are doing it on Twitter, it is still a pretty good indicator of how many people are talking about you and what they’re saying.
Photo of the Saskatchewan Jazz Festival by Pete Yee.
