My internship has been keeping me on my toes with new and exciting ways of thinking about communication and social media, and how these differ between the worlds of personal and professional.
One of my ongoing tasks here at Zaccaria has been updating the company's social media sites, namely Facebook and Twitter. In the live music and entertainment industry, these two communication platforms are imperative - customers and fans want information that is interesting and timely, and they want it often! As Zaccaria manages several events simultaneously, there are a number of things to consider when managing Zaccaria Events Presents Facebook and Twitter Pages. I will use any time I get (which is not often!) to scan the internet for music news and anything that might be relevant to our upcoming concerts or events.
On the Zaccaria Facebook page, my access as an "admin" allows me to see how many people our posts are reaching, the percentage of people engaged in our posts, the location of people who like our posts and our page, our most popular posts and the trends of our online marketing activity over time. This data allows me to strategise future posts - we are able to determine, before we post them, which updates are going to appeal to our target audience. One particularly important aspect of using social media as a marketing/PR/communications platform is ensuring the content is relevant. For example, if we announce the pre-sale of say The Presets tickets one morning through an eDM to our entire Zaccaria e-mail database - we then follow this activity up with a Facebook post with similar information in the eDM. I have realised the importance of, and how effective it is, to strengthen one medium by backing it up with a complimentary form of communication. Here is the Facebook post I released after the announce of The Presets on-sale.
This post reached 600 people after the first two hours of posting - a figure which is consistent with the fact that we announced through eDM the on-sale that morning.
While on the topic of being timely and relevant, another tour Zaccaria is promoting is Human Nature: The Christmas Tour. Zaccaria has been organising a number of publicity events to promote the tour, one of which was an TV appearance by Human Nature on Better Homes and Gardens. Following this appearance on a Friday night, I posted on Zaccaria's Facebook and Twitter pages to remind the public and our target audience of the tour. The idea is to keep people thinking about the event - it doesn't have to always be about announcing tickets on sale, but rather keeping our audience in the loop with the latest news and happenings of Zaccaria and the talent we are currently representing. Below is my Twitter post from this morning, which I was excited to see was "favourited" by Human Nature - meaning the word is getting out.
So there is my brief reflection on the importance of social media and how it can be utilised in a more effective way to maximise publicity by supporting another form of communication. My experience at Zaccaria has taught me that as PR professionals we cannot rely on one form of communication - we need to focus on creating a diverse, integrated marketing communication technique in order to resonate well with our stakeholders.
Is anyone else using social media at their internship, and what insights have you noticed from using it in a professional manner as oppose to just generally stalking people?
Hope to hear from some of you!
Delta
