Your festival, your audience: How to interact

By Johnny Beverton, Online Account Manager at Outpost

Johnny Beverton is an expert in Online Public Relations. Here he gives his advice to festivals on how to get the most out of social media.

Strategy is the key

Social media is a key element to any successful festival. Keeping in touch with your fans will increase the awareness of your festival and maintain its profile during the periods when you need to translate tentative interest into confirmed ticket sales.

Your social networks will play a vital part in creating the momentum required to achieve this goal. Using Twitter and a Facebook page is a must - making sure they are kept relevant with regular updates. People spend a lot of their free time on their social networks (and for some, also a lot of their work time) alongside regular music and festival websites. You want to be sure that your social networking pages are a portal of interesting information for the discerning festival goer.

There are a lot of things you can do to grow these pages, build awareness and connect with your audience. For example:

Facebook - tagging competitions - those who join and tag themselves on your page are entered into a draw to win merchandise/CDs/tickets.

Twitter - retweet competitions - with those who follow you, inviting them to retweet a post you’ve made with followers scrambling to get a chance to win merchandise/CDs/tickets. This will give you an excuse to contact your followers with something they’re going to really be interested in.

Contact all your fans via Twitter and Facebook asking what they’d like to hear on your new monthly festival podcast – not only are you engaging with them but the podcast works as great promotional material to use for your PR campaign.

Interacting with your followers on a personal level will help to build the bond that will ultimately attract people to part with their cash. People will see your Twitter as a gateway to have contact with you, the festival organiser - take full advantage of this opportunity to engage with your fans and talk to them. If you treat them right they will do a lot of the hard work for you.

Facebook Places and Foursquare

Cheryl Cole’s doing it for her new album – why can’t you? Facebook Places and Foursquare campaigns are creeping into our everyday lives. Imagine a poster advertising your festival which invites fans to login to Facebook on their phone, join your page and register their location on Facebook Places. Those who do will be added to a prize draw to win merchandise/CDs/tickets, and you can set up Facebook to announce specific news of your choice about the Festival on their feed. Not only will people be aware of your marketing through the poster on the street but they’ll also be advertising it themselves.

People want content

Give your fans a reason to talk about your event - come to them with the goods. Artists available for interview, artists with new tracks, news and releases you can piggyback off will help you on your quest for talkability. Got something to say? You could do a video interview talking about the festival and make it available for all to see via your social networks, website and newsletter.

It’s all about synergy

Don’t call me cheesy – it’s true. Using Twitter, Facebook and various other tools alongside your other PR and marketing exploits will really bring your online presence together. It’s not about one network; each have their own strengths. Festival success will stem from keeping up with new technologies and using them to grow your communities. There’s never been more competition and the clued up people are the ones who can command results online. You want to be one of them, right?

Contact johnny[at]outpostmedia.co.uk or call 0207 684 5634 for more info.