Hand Me Down Theatre is socially available on multiple types of social media. These include the ever popular Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. With the huge demand for social media on a day to day basis, we felt it compulsory to join in with the craze. “As of September 2013, 73% of online adults use social networking sites.” (pewinternet.org, 2013) We would be silly not to indulge into social media when such a high number of people use it. We wanted to connect with a wider scale of audience than what Lincoln had to offer, social media offers the opportunity to divulge into a broader range of people, business’s and theatre companies. With these ever changing digital platforms forming, we felt it a priority to offer our audience a look into our journey and process into the development of our show over the last few months. We regularly update our social media with little snippets from rehearsals, information about the show, and trailers and videos By posting on a day to day basis, helps our viewers and followers get a feel for the type of work that we do and help them to see into our performance for themselves. “In today’s world, social media is a must – a powerful tool for expanding your audience base” (Mitchell, Online)
Twitter offers us the opportunity to focus our posts and tweets to specific niche audiences, by hash tagging particular words or phrases for example #Shakespeare we open up our sites to those specific lovers of Shakespeare because they can search and will be able to find us and see that this is a topic we use in our performance of Take Me By The Tongue. “Twitter tracks phrases, words and hashtags that are most mentioned and posts them under the title of “trending topics” regularly.” (Kwak et al, 2010) It offers us a platform to gain followers which create a relationship between us and our cyber audience.
And it isn’t just us, thousands of theatre companies have taken to social media, for example traditional theatre company The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) surprised us with their use of twitter. Not only do they promote and tweet on a regular basis but they have used Twitter as a platform for a performance. This is such an exciting way of connecting with the widespread audience which the RSC has. “The Royal Shakespeare Company today joined with the cross-platform production firm Mudlark and Channel 4’s digital investment fund, 4iP, to launch Such Tweet Sorrow, a drama in real time and 4,000 tweets, very roughly based on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet” (Kennedy 2010) This style of performance connects both Shakespeare lovers with the modern users of social media.
Marketing over time has developed into a social media craze, with the triumph of the internet and improvement of technologies; we are now able to do so much more for so little.These sites have enabled us to post information quickly and efficiently to the wider audience, providing them with up to date and relevant information about our company. Facebook lets us create groups and events to publicize our performances, which helps with ticket sales as people will be able to know when and where the performance is, a good feature about Facebook is that it sends reminders about particular events. Instagram is a way in which we can show people the development and process of our piece through images, linking these images with Facebook Twitter and our blogs creates a circular marketing process. Hand Me Down uses Instagram to post pictures from rehearsals, trailer videos and posters and flyers. And to really capture the essence of what our company is about.
YouTube has become a world wide sensation, which aids us to show off our companies ideas visually through sound and video. YouTube lets us look for music, films, and readings and shows us a variation. Millions of people use YouTube, so a wide variety of people can look at your work. And Instagram has led us to be able to show sneak peaks of scenes, trailers and photos of every day process enabling us to create a photo feed of our development which a lot of people are interested in.
But what Hand Me Down wants to deliver to our audience is a new, exciting way of seeing what our company is about. We urge to offer some thing different than what other companies do.“The idea of the ever-growing toolbox and of diversifying ways of communicating with audiences is a trend echoed by a number of companies, ranging in budget size from multi-million dollars to nearly nothing. Even as social media has permeated theatre marketing, many theatres still struggle to understand how they can use social media most effectively.”(Peter, 2010, 9)This is something that we strive to do, use the varied range of social media to the best ability and to be the most effective when promoting and advertising our work. All of our social media sites are interconnected in some way shape or form. For example Youtube videos and trailers are posted on Twitter and Facebook, this allowing the potential audience to travel freely through our sites. And in the future we will endeavour to use social media to our advantage, offering our audience as much as we possibly can through these digital platforms. As a company we aim to go with the times and seek to keep up with the ever changing technologies.
Here is all the information you will need to find us.
Works Cited
–
Kennedy, M. (2010) Romeo and Juliet get Twitter Treatment. The Guardian, 12th April 2010. Also Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2010/apr/12/shakespeare-twitter-such-tweet-sorrow
–
Kwak, H et al (2010) What is Twitter, a social network or a news media?. International Conference of World Wide Web, 591-600.
–
Mitchell, A. (2014) Promoting Your Performance- In the News, and Social Media. [online] Available at: http://performingarts.about.com/od/Administration/a/Promoting-Your-Performances.htm [Accessed 22/05/2014]
–
Peter. R (2010) Social Media Marketing Takes Center Stage. Southern Theatre; Fall. 51 (4) 9-19
–
Pewinternet.org (2013) Social-networking-fact-sheet [online] Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/social-networking-fact-sheet/ [Accessed 22/05/2014]