Online marketing is a current and instant way to help build a business. ‘Technologies such as Twitter have the potential to give us more than just an opportunity to tell others what happened in our day. If we understand and appreciate what Twitter is capable of, we can use it to instantly share our lives with others, and we can use it to reach more people in a meaningful way’(Comm, 2012, p. x). You can share news within the comfort of your own home or wherever you are via a mobile phone. Having only 140 characters to write a message a person only gets a snip-it of what you want to say.
Twitter is a mobile social network which allows you to keep in touch with friends, family, businesses and companies that you may want to keep in touch with or are interested in. Twitter enables you to share what you are doing with the world, it gives small businesses and entrepreneurs the edge that they can’t necessarily get. ‘Every day, we see dozens of new ideas and ways to use twitter’ (Fitton, 2012, p. 6) as a brand new theatre company we had to incorporate these new ideas and use Twitter to its full capability to ensure that as a company we are creating a broad database of potential audience members. Through Twitter as a company we are able to promote 130,000 for free, without spending hundreds of pounds on promotional material.
When first creating the Twitter the design was a pivotal part.
When a potential follower first accesses our sight we want them to get a good first impression. The design is essential as that first impression could decide weather they follow the company or judge them and move on. With a little touch of creativity and a clever design, by Tweeting the right thing a company may catch the eye of a potential follower. A potential follower leads to word of mouth witch could then possibly increase ticket sales. Having a professional logo as our profile picture and a professional promotional picture as our header instantly we create a professional first impression. Potential customers and followers get to know the face behind the company, which can help building Wakeup Theatre.
When writing tweets the art was keeping it simple, ‘Twitter geniuses sprung form the idea of serving as a status update tool, and at its most basic level, that’s what it is’ ( Thomases, 2012, p. 20). Having only 140 characters, tweets are meant to be kept at a basic level. Twitters ‘clean interface and easy to understand’ (Thomases, 2010, p. 25) layout makes is accessible to anyone. The biggest mistake criticues see companies do on Twitter is when they first hit Twitter they think of it as a ‘channel to push out information’ (O’Reilly and Milstein, 2012, p. 201) , by adding complicated Tweets with hyperlinks to other more complicated means of advertisement there is a potential fear that we may be turning away audience members. In The Twitter Book, Tom O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein say that ‘the average number of tweets per day amongst all users [is] ‘4.22’ (O’Reilly and Milston, 2012, p. 129).Tweeting on average 3 to 4 times a day it appeared that @WAKEUPtheatre kept our followers engaged. We were lucky enough to have several Reweets and Tweets’by companies such as @WhatsOnLincol, @unilincol, @MyUniLincoln, @UBTLincoln and @LPAC_Lincoln witch lead to a dramatic increase in our followers.
After every post we would always try and hashtag. Hashtagging by adding a the simple # symbol before writing a word or phrase enables another person who is specifically researching something to type in said word or phrase and the message will appear. For example on the 28th February we wrote this Tweet:
Here we hashtagged ‘#realwords’ ‘#realworlds’ and ‘#realpeople’ (WAKEUP Theatre, 2013, Online). If a person was researching something about real words then our tweet would come up, hopefully once they take a look round our page they will follow the company and take an interest in what we do.
On the 9th May we uploaded our first promotional shot, shown here:
This was the first time that our followers had seen us as a cast and were able to get a slight insight into what 130.00 may be. When tweeting the picture we asked the question ‘what do you think?'(WAKEUP Theatre, 2013, Online) by addressing our followers directing it enabled them to feel personally engaged.
Occasionally we would upload pictures from our rehearsals, shown here:
This was to ensure our followers that the work we were creating was developing ready for the performance. People generally enjoy pictures so by posting a tweet that is a picture followers are more likely to have a look, by incorporating ticket information underneath the picture we are constantly reminding followers the information they need to know.
On the 13th May we uploaded a ‘sneak preview of part of our set’ (WAKEUP Theatre, 2013, Online).
This picture gathered a lot of interest. Potential audience members asked questions and people were intrigued to as what the box was, this picture was a effective marketing tool.
Works Cited
Comm, Joel (2010) Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time, New Jersey: John Wiley & Son
Fitton, Laura (2012) Twitter For Dummies, New Jersey: John Wiley & Son
O’Reilly and Sarah Milstein (2012) The Twitter Book, Sebastopol: O’Reilly Media
Thomases, Hollis (2010) Twitter Marketing: An Hour a Day, Indiana: Wiley Publishing
WAKEUP Theatre (2013) 130,000 an adaptation of Fallout by Roy Williams, Lincoln: Lincoln School of Performing Arts.
WAKEUPtheatre (2013) Twitter, 23 May. Available at: https://twitter.com/WAKEUPtheatre (accessed: 24th May 2013)