marketing – Breaking Stories Theatre Company

Facebook

June 2, 2014 Beth Sutch

Starting up a Facebook page is useful for any business, especially for the ones who are on a tight budget. By using Facebook which is a free device we can target audiences and promote our show. Setting up a Facebook page means that we can have more interaction with our audience and feed them our ideas and hopefully receive back their thoughts and feelings too.

Here is one example of a article which was shared onto our Facebook page to get our audiences involved with our production. It gives them an idea of what our performance is going to be about. Also to show how our Theatre Company is true to our manifesto, by presenting that what is happening within the world, currently inspired us to do the piece of theatre.

Being an admin member on a Facebook page is great to look at progression in which our page is making – by looking at the stats we can see how many likes we have and in how many days we have acquired these.

From these graphs we are able to see the ‘buzz’ around our Facebook page, this is where Daniela fits it. She would push us all as a company to share posts and the page so that more people could view and like our page. Meaning that the likes and interaction increases.

Within a month we raised everything much higher, had many more likes and more people engaging within our page and posts. I believe this is down to the useful tool of being able to merge two social media sites together. Daniela was able to connect Twitter to Facebook – meaning that what she posted on Twitter would then automatically be posted onto our Facebook page. This is such a time saver as for the last few weeks Daniela has been able to just update Twitter with the knowledge that Facebook will be updated too.

Reflection on marketing

May 27, 2014June 2, 2014 Daniela Scimeca

Social media

Regarding the marketing plan I was pleased we surpassed our target of 100 likes on Facebook and 100 followers on Twitter with the total being; 104 Facebook likes and 255 followers on Twitter. However in hindsight to boost our awareness on these sites we could have made accounts for the main characters which would have let our audiences know a little more about them prior to performance.

Fundraising

Although we did a collection for Amnesty International at the end of the performance we could have had fundraising events prior to the day to boost the money we raised. This also would have given the public an insight into our ethos as a company.

Flyers and Poster

I was extremely pleased with the quality of our posters and flyers however regrettable our age restriction for the event went unmentioned. If we were to tour this, this is something I would like to rectify.

General promotion

It was very rewarding to learn that 5 women from Amnesty International Lincoln had come to see the performance. This showed how our marketing techniques were effective in achieving our goal of reaching political and charitable organisations.

Using Facebook for Marketing

May 25, 2014June 2, 2014 Daniela Scimeca

Facebook has been a useful marketing tool for promoting and raising awareness about our company. ‘With around a billion active users, Facebook presents a unique opportunity to connect with and educate your ideal audience’ (Porterfield et al, 2013, 9).

I created an event via the Facebook website. ‘Facebook Events can be a powerful way to get your event noticed and shared within the Facebook community’ (Porterfield et al, 2013, 381). Having a Facebook event would be a great way to advertise when and where our event was to take place and by people responding we could see what the potential audience capacity could be. I included the date, time, and location, I also included a description of the play, the roles of everyone within the company, age restrictions, and a short summary of why we seek to exist. Altogether this gives a well-rounded summary of what to expect, providing all the information for perspective ticket bookers. As well as myself, I made the rest of the company ‘hosts’ of the event so we could all invite our friends and family and boost awareness of the event.

To encourage interaction I would every so often post on the event to remind people of the date. For example on May 7^th I suggested entering our competition in order to win two free tickets to the performance:

‘[…] it’s important to remind people about your event often, just in case they missed the post in their News Feeds’ (Porterfield et al, 2013, 393). Whilst this notified people of the event again, it also invited people to view our Facebook page as I tagged it in the post.

Works Cited

Porterfield, A., Khare, P., and Vahl, A. (2013) Facebook Marketing: All-in-one for Dummies. Hoboken, N,J: John Wiley.

Scimeca, D. (2014) Print Screen Image From Facebook. Lincoln.

Live on The Nicola Gilroy Show

May 25, 2014 Lauren May Richardson

On the 22^nd May I was asked by Diane Dubois to go onto BBC Lincolnshire to promote Breaking Stories Theatre Company up and coming performance. I felt this was a challenge as I had never spoken live on radio, however it was a challenge I was willing to take in my stride!

Upon researching a bit into radio I found some information which shocked me. It stated that ‘women and minorities, namely African Americans, were portrayed according to the prevailing social biases of the time – as radio reflected the cultural status quo. Women were depicted on the air as domestic caregivers-housewives and mothers- and blacks and other minorities were represented as second class citizens to be ignored and stereotyped.’ (Keith, 2008, P.1) Eventually I found it quite ironic that when radio first came out blacks and women had no voice. Yet now in 2014 here I was, a woman about to talk about a foreign female and how there is a typecast around foreign people in our country.

While on the radio Nicola Gilroy asked me many questions on my theatre company and the performance we had produced. Nicola prompting me with all these questions enabled me to remain calm and discuss what I thought was necessary without missing any important factors out. Upon listening back to the broadcast I felt it went a lot better than I at first imagined! I sensed that you could really get a feel for what the play was about and that would hopefully stir up some interest from the listeners.

The listeners were an important factor to me and I wanted to discover what age range I would be communicating with. The receptionist at BBC Lincolnshire said that the listeners were of the older age due to the time of day the show was aired. This type of show worked for the elderly ‘as listeners grow older they graduate from music to speech radio.’(Crisell, 1994, P.204) I felt that targeting the elderly age range was perfect as we had already targeted the younger generation by doing a radio show on siren FM.

Going onto The Nicola Gilroy Show was an excellent idea as it will hopefully draw in a more diverse audience to our showing of The Bogus Woman. It is always hard to give student shows an awareness in the city of Lincoln, and I am hoping that the promotion on BBC Lincolnshire will entice in a few residents within Lincoln.

Crisell, A. (1994). Understanding Radio. 2nd ed. New York : Routledge.

Keith, M. (2008). Radio Cultures. The Sound Medium in American Life. New York : Peter Lang Publishing.

@breakingst0ries -Mixing Twitter with business

May 22, 2014June 2, 2014 Daniela Scimeca

Twitter is a great way for promoting your business online. Dhiraj Murthy describes it’s uses, ‘Twitter allows users to maintain a public web-based asynchronous “conversation” through the use of 140-characters messages (the length of text messages) sent from mobile phones, mobile Internet devices, or through various websites’ (2013, 1-2) This suggests the social network is advantageous to businesses as you can tweet from anywhere.

Twitter allows you to share news with anyone, therefore this was a great benefit for us as a new theatre company as I was able to follow companies/ family/friends/charities that I thought would be interested in our company. This was useful in building up our potential audience database and getting people interested about our performance. Furthermore advertising and promoting through twitter is free so there was no extra costs to our business. Here are just some of the people/organisations i have followed:

followers, women, immigration — Scimeca, 2014

The design of our profile was important to catch potential follower’s eyes. I chose to use our logo as the profile picture so people could identify this with our company. I also used our picture of the The Young Woman character in the play to create a sense of familiarity. The importance of a professional photograph is that it creates a good professional company image for us. Here is our profile:

Scimeca, 2014

Joel Comm suggests, ‘To build followers and keep them engaged, you have to produce good content’ (2009, 92). Therefore when tweeting I always tried to keep it simple. With only 140 characters to use, the tweets would need to be catchy and memorable; ‘Good content on twitter needs to be entertaining. It needs to be informative. It needs to be valuable. (Joel, Comm, 2009, 93). This suggests the key to getting our tweets noticed was variety. To do this I would update our followers with pictures of rehearsals, remind them of our performance, post videos and also provide content on the issue we explore in our performance, Immigration. This meant anyone interested was getting a full insight into the company and our progress.

Works Cited:

Murthy, D. (2013) Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age. Cambridge: Polity.

Comm, J. (2009) Twitter Power: How to Dominate your Market one Tweet at a Time. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley.

Scimeca, D. (2014) Print Screen Images of Twitter Page. Lincoln.