social media
I managed the growth and engagement strategy for Tortuga Music Festival’s accounts on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. A personal accomplishment was surpassing 100,000 followers on the Tortuga Music Festival Facebook page.
When crafting a post, a social ad, or responding to comments, I try to keep in mind that social networks were intended for personal connections and strive to take a human and conversational approach in my work.
See below for examples.
Audience Engagement
I think it's important to focus on social media content that encourages conversation, solves problems, entertains, inspires, or teaches. We found that the more we were engaged in the discussions on our social channels, the more quality of an audience we were building. We also found we had a stronger connection with and a better understanding of our fans. The more we interacted, the more our fans would engage back, increasing the chances for their activity to show up in their friends' feeds, and helping us get in front of even more people on our channels.
Fan-Centric Content
You would think a music festival's social content would revolve around artist performances; however, our social strategy for Tortuga was to feature the fan experience as much as possible.
This lineup announcement video is an excellent example of this strategy. We asked our fans to call into a hotline, record a message about the festival, and then we interweaved their voicemails into the video. Additionally, we focused on fan footage rather than artist performance footage to sell the experience.
call to action
All of our social content was very intentional. I developed specific, measurable goals (key performance indicators) for our posts, such as website visits and engagement benchmarks.
I learned that having one very simple, straightforward call-to-action, such as directing fans to a link or asking them to comment or share, helped us reach our specific goal for each post.
Artist Involvement
We did several "artist takeovers' "on our social handles in advance of the festival. These included having an artist takeover our Twitter or Instagram for the day or going live on our Facebook page.
These takeovers were fun for both the artist and our social communities and created an opportunity for genuine direct engagement.
Check out this guide I created for Luke Combs' team to prepare for a Facebook Live.
sponsor content
Several of our sponsorship commitments included supporting our sponsors with social posts. It can be tough to find a way to make sponsored content not feel like an advertisement on social media, especially when trying to build a community focused on your fans. I tried to find a balance between satisfying the brand's need for exposure to our community and providing our followers with something meaningful. I worked with our sponsorship team to show festival experiences rather than product ads or show how a brand helped support us doing something good like a beach cleanup.
paid social
I've managed paid social media campaign efforts across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat and had a lot of success using custom and lookalike audiences, retargeting, and strategic targeting.
My goal was to increase social media follows, website traffic, and email signups, all of which ultimately helped lead to ticket conversions.
Event Social Activation
I worked with social activation companies to integrate social media into the live experience at our festivals. Together we aggregated fan social content onto screens around the festival site. As a result, the integration incentivized more user-generated content during the event and increased our social reach through our fans. We also embedded the social feed on our website so fans could still check out the content long after the event ended.
Check out a recap report from one of our first activations at Tortuga here.
