Dialogues & Entertainments
Tell me a little bit about Maryland Ensemble Theatre
Maryland Ensemble Theatre is a professional theatre in downtown Frederick. We’re in our 12th season! We have a mainstage series (we do classics, new plays and we also create our own pieces), the Fun Company (theatre for families), The Ensemble School (theatre training for kids and adults) and The Comedy Pigs (sketch/improv comedy troupe).
Why did you decide to start using social media?
We started for a couple of reasons. We knew we needed to start trying new ways of reaching audiences. Print advertising has been losing its effectiveness for years. And it seemed like everyone was getting MySpace pages and blogging. It just seemed like to band wagon to jump on. We started using social media at the same time we really stepped up our grassroots marketing efforts. We’re really focused on creating good word of mouth buzz, and social media is a great way to do that.
Anthology of Instrumental Music from the End of the Sixteenth to the End of the Seventeenth Century (Da Capo Press Music Reprint Series)
How did you start?
We started about 3 years ago with a MySpace page, followed by a Facebook page and Youtube a few months later. We started blogging about 2 years ago and have been on Twitter since February 2009. We just jumped in. Not much of a plan at all! Three years ago when we started, there wasn’t as much buzz about social media as there is now. There weren’t conferences and webinars and people telling you how to integrate you social media plan with the rest of your marketing or how to calculate ROI. Or maybe there were, but I didn’t see them! For us, it was a way to reach younger audiences (although that really hasn’t been the case. The majority of our Facebook users are in the 35-55 age group!) and to expand marketing efforts as print advertising becomes less effective and print editorial space declines. So we jumped in, figured out how all the different outlets worked, and then went back and thought about planning. Which worked for us, I think if you wait until you have the perfect plan, you’ll never dive in and figure out how to tweet or upload a video or whatever.
What tools/sites are your currently using?
Facebook, Twitter, Youtube and a blog. We also have a Myspace, but just keep it updated with show dates, not much interaction there anymore for us.
What results have you seen?
I think Twitter has been amazing at raising our visibility among local people and businesses. MET has definitely been given opportunities though the twitter community- partnerships and whatnot, that we would not even know about otherwise. It’s really hard to judge the impact on ticket sales, but I look at our social media efforts as public relations, not advertising. Our blog posts, videos and Facebook posts have really started to generate conversations about our work, which is super exciting. Just this week we got ‘like’s and comments on facebook from people I don’t even know! So I see our online community starting to grow beyond the inner circle of employees, board members, volunteers, season ticket holders, etc. I think that’s the most exciting part – to put up a video of a rehearsal, or interview with a director and a week later over 100 people have watched it, and some have posted comments and we get to have a conversation. A conversation that we would never have without social media. People would just come to see a show, sit in the seat and maybe read the director’s notes in the playbill, then go home. But with our social media efforts, the experience begins even before they get here – with the reading of a blog post, or commenting about rehearsal photos on Facebook, or watching a video. And then after they see the show, there’s a place for them to talk about what they thought, it’s a whole different way to connect with patrons.
What has been your biggest challenge in using social media tools?
Time! Social media is time consuming. Maintaining a consistent presence on Facebook and Twitter, shooting, editing and uploading video to YouTube and trying to blog at least 3 times a week takes a lot of time. So juggling that with all the other things on my plate is hard, especially since social media is so much more fun than the other things on my plate! I’d say a second big challenge is measuring results in a way that I can present to my boss and to our board of directors. I know MET’s visibility has been raised through our social media efforts, but I don’t have any numbers or charts to back that up. And it’s almost impossible to track how social media affects our ticket sales. But in the end, our social media strategy is to engage our audience members and our community and I think we’re doing that.