“Online technology has made it possible for audience relationships to be reinvented and reputations to be redrawn across the theatrical spectrum” (Carson 2011, P. 181)
Creating a STAMP Theatre Facebook and Twitter profile was a vital step in establishing ourselves as an acknowledged theatre company, and throughout our process we have tried to use each form of social media to its full advantage and get as much public online interest as possible.
Facebook:
Below is a still image from STAMP Theatre’s official Facebook page, and the graph outlines how many people the material on our Facebook profile reached. Having this sort of tool was very useful as it has allowed us to see what elements of creative arts marketing via social media we were either successful or unsuccessful in. Posting both of STAMP Theatre’s teaser trailers reached up to 1400 people via Facebook alone, and various promotional images we posted also reached a great number, this is beneficial as it both keeps audiences interested in our work and gives them an insight into what they will see in our performance, also having a profile online enabled our advertisements to be seen my more people than through the medium of flyers. The ‘insights’ graph also shows that each time STAMP Theatre posted either a status, image or video that the public also began commenting on our work via their own Facebook profiles or simply ‘liking’ it. When the public do this, their own Facebook friends will see STAMP Theatre’s work, which generates more Facebook activity surrounding our profile and may contribute to ticket sales.
Below is a graph on our company Facebook profile outlining the audience demographics in age that we reached via Facebook, and it shows a majority of our online advertisements reached 18-24 year olds. This reveals how unequal our Facebook audience demographics are, if we were to redo this process we would definitely aim to advertise to a wider demographic in age, but, as we are all students we will obviously attract a large number of audiences around the same age as us. However, to even out the age demographics of our audience we could have possibly looked into advertising on more than just Facebook and Twitter (both of which holds a majority of users in this age bracket), for example community noticeboards online.
An additional positive repercussion of having a company Facebook profile is that not only the company can publicly speak about our work but audiences can as well. By ‘tagging’ our company name, the public who have ‘liked’ our Facebook profile can comment on our work, company and upcoming production. We found this to be both extremely beneficial to our company’s reputation and a cost-free form of advertising, examples of the public’s Facebook statuses about our company can be seen below.
Twitter:
Twitter is quickly becoming an extremely popular social media tool, and a huge majority of Theatre Companys are using it to their advantage. Similar to how we used STAMP Theatre’s Facebook profile, we frequently posted tweets about how rehearsals were coming along, various photographs and links to the LPAC website where the public could buy tickets.
What is so beneficial to a company through Twitter is the concept of ‘mentioning’ and ‘retweeting’, someone could mention our company and work, and provide a link to our own Twitter page, this would then be available to all of that person’s Twitter friends, thus advertising our company to a huge degree. This benefitted us before and after our performance of ‘The Trial’…
Below are examples of the ‘mentions’ STAMP Theatre received from the public prior to our performance. Reading that someone had bought their ticket for our performance may have stirred another to buy theirs, hearing news of our work through your friend may influence a person greater than seeing posts directly from our Twitter feed.
Below are examples of Twitter ‘mentions’ after our performance. If we were a real professional company these sort of public views published via social media would be invaluable, as if someone saw that this performance was extremely well received via Twitter, they may be more inclined to come and see a future one.
Facebook and Twitter have been hugely beneficial in our advertisement online, as a huge majority of the British population use these types of social media regularly, it would be foolish not to utilise them to push ticket sales to the maximum.
Works cited.
Carson, C. (2011) ‘Technology as a Bridge to Audience Participation’ in Broadhurst, S. and Machon, J. (ed.) Performance and Technology, Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp 181-193
Caitlin Clark