10 Feb How to Make Your Live Event Explode on Social Media
If you’re going to ask hundreds, thousands, or millions of people to pay attention to your brand during a major, real-time live event, you better make it count. But how? Entertainment brands can be seen as having it easy, with passionate, engaged fan bases to drive awareness for a live event or activation. More traditional brands may have to work a little harder to build up a base of avid followers. So why shouldn’t traditional brands learn from the live-event pros? By paying attention to how entertainment brand names—music festivals, television shows, comedians—create live-event hype that lasts, you can learn how to take your brand’s live activations to the next level.
From my own personal experience of being a TV buff, a live music addict, and a general purveyor of all things pop-culture, I offer you three of my favorite live experiences that have been bolstered by a creative social media strategy. My hope is that these three events can inspire you to craft a live-social event that exceeds the bounds of your typical execution.
Here’s how the best of the best brands make fans feel like they’re on the inside, even when they’re not physically there.
BLAM: Bonnaroo Lineup Announcement Megathon
When I heard about this one, I thought they may have finally lost their minds. Every year, the prominent music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, finds a way to up the ante. Honestly, no music festival comes close to the excitement that surrounds a lineup announcement than Bonnaroo.
Here’s what went down this year: Bonnaroo opened a phone line at 6 PM on the Tuesday of the announcement. Enthusiastic festival-goers called that line and once they made it through, they were given one band to announce on behalf of the festival. The fan was tasked to announce it in their own creative way with the hashtag, #Bonnaroo. The festival aggregated the best responses on a live-board. Social media chatter spiked immediately. The phone line crashed, and the announcement went on for three hours. As a result, the announcement was a trending topic for most of the night.
Bottom Line: If you’re launching or announcing something exciting, get your fans involved. Make them feel exclusive, just like Bonnaroo did. Just, maybe, don’t rely on a phone line to carry the weight of your fans.
Broad City Live!
For me, this one is a little more personal. I’m a huge fan of the Broad City girls, and they really know how to make a splash on social media. I was lucky enough to catch their live show before Broad City Season 2 premiered earlier this year.
In the weeks leading up to the show, I kept up with the girls on social media. They hid tickets in each town they visited and snapped a vague picture of the whereabouts to share on social media. They took pictures with the crowd every night they performed. And lastly, they encouraged you to share the experience before the show started with #BroadCityLive. All content was aggregated on a content hub that was projected to the crowd. Everyone got excited when they saw their photo on the board.
This fan integration kept me coming back to their channels. Before, I was looking at Broad City’s social to give me a preview of what I would see at their show. After, I was looking for my face in the crowd photo and eagerly awaiting more previews of their new season.
The interaction doesn’t stop at their live shows, either. See how these girls keep fans wanting more every day by reading one of our former Igniter’s write up on Broad City’s social strategy.
Bottom Line: Broad City knows how to hype a live show. And they know how to keep the fans coming back. They surprise and delight fans who share their experiences on social by syndicating their user-generated content. They engage.
#TGIT: The Moment Shonda Rhimes Owned Thursday Nights
Welcome to Shondaland. Famed showrunner Shonda Rhimes is the official queen of Thursday night television. She’s involved with a three hour block of television drama that America can’t seem to get enough of. Whether you’re a fan of one of her shows or you tune in for all three hours of well-crafted drama on ABC every Thursday, there’s a chance that you’ve followed the hashtag #TGIT while watching.
Better known as Thank God It’s Thursday, ABC is playing off of their once popular TGIF programming block with a new brand of Shonda Rimes drama that is dominating prime time. On average, Scandal pulls in 400,000 tweets every week. and at its flanks are How to Get Away With Murder and Grey’s Anatomy with 200,000 tweets each. All three shows happily sit in the top five of the Twitter TV rankings each week.
So how does she do it? The Shondaland team made it an event all their own. Before each episode, at least one star pops on the screen for a split second reminding fans to tweet along. Commercials support the ongoing #TGIT campaign, and each cast member uses their star power to activate their own fan bases. Doubting the power of Shonda? Just tune in to Twitter next Thursday night. You’ll see.You may even get caught up and join in on the fun.
Bottom Line: There are ways to keep your fans coming back again and again. Just tap into what fans love most about your product. Shondaland fans are obsessed with her shows because they bring the drama. What does your product bring? It’s there. You just have to find it.
It’s easy to write off these success stories and say that all these campaigns were successful because they come from the entertainment world. Why not take a page from their playbook and try something big? Use activations like these as inspiration so you can make your event really stand out. Tap into passion, keep them coming back for more, and make them feel exclusive and special.
They’re your fans and they deserve it!
