Music festivals provide fantastic examples of creative social media use. Because they have to essentially reinvent themselves every year – rebrand, find enticing acts, ensure that they provide a more amazing experience than last year – they need to be innovative in how they use social media. If they aren’t, they’ll soon be left behind.
So which music festivals do it best? Which show the rest of the world exactly how beneficial social media can be? Here are four festivals who have either seemingly perfected social media, or totally changed how social media is used.
Tomorrowland Shows Us How to Youtube
Belgium’s massive electronic dance music festival, Tomorrowland, have got this YouTube thing figured out. How else do you explain the fact that their 2014 official aftermovie has – thus far – received almost 50 million views?
To put that into perspective, if you look at the corresponding videos from Lollapalooza, Sziget, Coachella, Bonnaroo, EXIT and EDC – a collection of the biggest festivals in the world – Tomorrowland got ten times more views than all of their clips combined.
The success of the Tomorrowland clip is thanks to not only amazing production, but a knowledge of how a YouTube viewer thinks. Despite being 30 minutes long (a lifetime in YouTube terms), the video doesn’t allow you to switch off. There’s no boring bits. It’s a stunning piece of work filled with amazing footage and a purpose-built soundtrack, ripped from the festival itself. It’s a sizeable investment that has more than paid off for the festival.
Electric Daisy Carnival Makes Twitter Work for Them
But you needn’t have high production value videos to make social media work for you. Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas makes Twitter work for them, by using a hashtag (#EDCHELP) to centralise attendee questions, which they monitor before and during the festival.
The beauty of the public nature of #EDCHELP is that it allows other attendees to do the hard work for you. By tweeting questions rather than emailing or calling, anyone with the required knowledge can see the query and reply to the asker.
Do we have to register our EDC passes?? #help#edchelp
— Jerry Morales (@jerrybowberry) 16 juin 2016
@jerrybowberry yasss
— Badgalbribri (@BreeanaDestiny) 16 juin 2016
@BreeanaDestiny thank you?
— Jerry Morales (@jerrybowberry) 16 juin 2016
Although the festival would ideally answer all of the questions itself, sometimes there are simply too many to deal with. Using Twitter in this way makes the festival more efficient, and also adds to the community feel of the event, with attendees helping attendees.
La Route du Rock Shows off Its SocialWall
The French festival of La Route du Rock knows the value of crowd participation. Having an engaged crowd that is active on social media can spread word of the festival quicker than anything else. That’s why they utilised a SocialWall at the 2015 event.
A SocialWall is a means to display Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts on a big screen at your event. Using a predetermined hashtag, attendees post festival content to social media, and an administrator sifts through the posts and displays whichever photos, videos or messages they like.
There’s nothing more thrilling to a festival-goer than getting their face up on the big screen. Using a SocialWall promotes engagement, which means a far greater social media presence for La Route du Rock.
Sziget Unites Its Szitizens on Twitter
The monstrous Hungarian festival of Sziget attracts a massive 400,000 people over the course of a week. The festival’s official Twitter account (@szigetofficial) may not have a huge amount of followers – a little over 75,000 at last count – but they use the account excellently.
They use strong imagery, hardly ever posting an update without a corresponding picture. They also commit to strong and consistent hashtag use, with #Sziget2016, #Budapest and #szitizen used in almost every tweet in the last iteration of the event. The #szitizen hashtag was so popular, in fact, that it has grown into a term that the community uses to refer to themselves. Sziget festival provides the perfect example of doing the Twitter basics well.
Last chance to become a Szitizen for 7 days! Hurry up! See you very very soon! ❤ pic.twitter.com/TQz7m5NKMS
— Sziget Festival (@szigetofficial) 27 juin 2016
So, what lessons can your event or organisation take from these music festivals? Are you creative enough with your social media use?
Social media is ripe for experimentation. You just have to be brave enough to take the leap.
