Leveraging Social Media for Music Festivals.

Many music festival organisers are maximising their exposure and customer engagement with social media. However, the music festivals with smaller teams may not be maximising the opportunities available with social media platforms. What are some basic steps festival organisers can take to utilise these tools effectively? 

Music festivals potentially have many touch points from ticket buyers to volunteers, vendors and corporate sponsors. Each audience will likely prefer to view the festival information on different platforms so the organisers should make allowances for this. Of course, this is much easier if there are experienced marketing personnel in the events team. However, many festival organisers still rely on a Facebook page or website alone. What are the steps that under resourced festival organisers can take to increase their exposure?

All social media channels are free to set up, it just takes a little time to create an account for each one. The key to successful use of these social media channels is to regularly add engaging content as this will create fans and followers. Once all the accounts have been created and content is getting added it is very important to ensure that appropriate links are made across different platforms so that audiences can easily navigate to their desired social media platform. The content could vary between different platforms and can be tailored to that audience. What are the key social media platforms that music festival organisers should consider? 

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Pinterest
• YouTube/Vimeo
• TikTok
• Twitter
• LinkedIn 

Facebook is a great all round social media platform that is good for making announcements as well as uploading pictures and videos. Ensure that the page created is a business page as this opens up additional business suite tools. Instagram is part of the Facebook empire and so it cross links functionality although Instagram is primarily for sharing pictures and video clips.

Having professional YouTube and Vimeo accounts allows for the uploading of videos and streamed events and is the preferred viewing format for many that watch music videos. They also have functionality to link seamlessly with a festival’s website so site visitors can watch YouTube videos on a website page without leaving the site. TikTok is the trending social media platform and although popular is limited in length of video clips that can be posted.

Twitter and LinkedIn are popular social media platforms but tend to be more biased to the business community. This does not mean that a music festival should not use them, Twitter has long been an excellent platform to make official newsworthy announcements. LinkedIn is the platform that should be used to promote the commercial side of the festival and will be of particular relevance to potential corporate sponsors as well as contractors, suppliers and vendors. 

This is only a brief starters guide to the social media platforms that music festival organisers should be considering adding to their portfolio. Creating accounts is the easy part, the hard work is in regularly adding engaging content, however, technology now exists to help post a piece of content across all social media platforms with a single click.

For any music festival organisers planning an event in 2021 using a software management platform like Festival Pro gives them all the functionality they need manage every aspect of their music festival. The guys who are responsible for this software have been in the front line of event management for many years and the features are built from that experience and are performance artists themselves. The Festival Pro platform is easy to use and has comprehensive features with specific modules for managing artists, contractors, venues/stages, vendors, volunteers, sponsors guestlists and ticketing. 

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