It is crucial to monitor what is posted on the social media websites as “social media (can be viewed) as a performance space” (Lonergan, 2016, 34). It was important to decipher what kind of social media posts would suit the theme and essence of the theatre company as a whole. We wanted to reach out to new audiences, we achieved this by releasing previews of our performance and promoted our Kickstarter page which helped raise money for our performance.
So how was Kick a Pigeon Theatre promoted?
Out of all the social media websites that was set up by Marketing, Facebook is by far our most successful. We have high audience interaction and used this platform to advertise all our fundraising events and our main marketing campaign and fun ‘face in the hole’ images were uploaded. This allowed us to promote that our show was to be set in the 90s as we took famous 90s films and music artists and replaced their faces with cast members.
One cast member agreed to dye their hair into a style fit for the 90s, in order for this to take place, a campaign was set up on social media. The terms were; when our Facebook page hits 300 likes, the hair dying will take place LIVE. This campaign was chosen to be sponsored, therefore it had more of an audience outreach. By spending £9, in enabled our company to be more widespread advertised resulting in us hitting our desired 300 likes.
Many images and videos were posted onto Facebook, the most popular marketing source was the boomerangs which were uploaded. Boomerangs are four second videos which make an image appear to go backwards and forwards – this was a great application to use in order to give our audiences previews of our work.
We used Facebook to introduce the cast members one by one. Giving the audience and insight into their lives by adding 90s related question and answers along with an image of the cast member. Our posts were targeted to be posted at around 17:00 – 18:00, peak hours for when Facebook users were returning from work.
Facebook was used to promote our two fundraiser events which were our quiz – ‘Quizzing in the Name of’ and a film night where we showed Jurassic Park in the Platform Bar.
Facebook will be the host of our 7 day countdown to our show Record ’97.
(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017a)
(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017b)
Our Twitter page is proving difficult to establish a large following, this could be due to the mass of tweets which are posted daily from other users making it possible for our tweets to get lost. Next time, in order to overcome this, the Twitter page should be advertised more widely on our more successful social media platforms.
(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017c)
Despite far less users being on Instagram than Facebook, it has proven to be a popular marketing tool for us. We were able to use hashtags which worked in getting more widespread attention from other users who used the same hashtags as us an example being #internationalwomensday where the female members of the cast recreated a Spice Girls famous pose, which linked in to our 90s nostalgia theme.
(Kick A Pigeon Theatre, 2017d)
With Instagram being a visual social media platform, it proved easy for us to give people insights into our rehearsals.
Snapchat
A snapchat account was created, however was not used to its full potential. We advertised certain ‘takeovers’ where in one writing session, the writers gave the snapchat users a preview of the work they were creating. Compared to other platforms, it isn’t as successful as Facebook.
Works Cited
Lonergan, P. (2015) Theatre and Social Media. London: Palgrave.
Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017a) Film Night Event. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.
Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017b) Quiz Night Image. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.
Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017c) Twitter Image. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.
Kick A Pigeon Theatre. (2017d) Spice Girls Instagram Image. [image] Lincoln Performing Arts Centre: Kick A Pigeon Theatre.