Brief
Wales Millennium Centre is the celebrated home for culture in Wales. In 2017, the Centre appointed jamjar to handle its social media – including developing its strategy, generating content and managing its channels.
Social media objectives were developed in line with overall business objectives, focusing on:
- Increasing the reputation of the Centre as one the leading performing arts centres in the world
- Celebrating the innovative work of the Centre and promoting its line-up of world-class theatrical productions and artists
- Broadening horizons and offering young people in Wales access to the arts
- Building and nurturing its online community by creating an informed, friendly and human voice behind the organisations
- Directing traffic to the Centre’s website to support sales
What we did
Research and planning
- Extensive research was carried out including:
- Team briefings and inductions
- A social media audit of the Centre’s channels
- Benchmarking against competitors and similar organisations
- Audience analyses
- Using analytical tools and data to understand the best times to post content
Alongside this we mapped out the Centre’s ‘what’s on’ calendar and national awareness days and weeks to help us plan content creation.
Established Social Centre
We established a Social Media Steering Group consisting of selected representatives from the marketing, communications, front of house, customer service, and business development team. This group met weekly to discuss content and review performance.
Training
We wanted staff to be engaged with and contributing to our social media efforts so we carried out a number of bespoke workshops with Centre staff on blogging, vlogging and social media.
We were also involved with the Centre’s youth engagement programmes and held a number of workshops to inspire and educate young people into careers in the arts. We used these workshops as an opportunity to glean insight from younger audiences, identifying ways to create maximum engagement with those in the 18-21 demographic.
Content creation and curation
Unique, engaging and shareable content was key to the success of the Centre’s social media channels.
We worked with the production companies coming to the Centre to curate and plan content for their forthcoming shows and adapted it for a Welsh audience.
Our in-house team of content creators also developed hundreds of pieces of unique content including images, infographics, blogs, listicles, videos, competitions, GIFs, polls, playlists, quizzes and much more!
Highlights include behind the scenes with Take That, #CentreClaus Christmas competition and a Hairspray Instagram takeover.
We also developed content to promote the Centre’s volunteering scheme. While it is one of the most iconic buildings in Wales, many are unaware that it is a charity, so we worked with volunteers to create blogs and social media content, and also produced a video explaining the Centre’s charitable goals and community focus.
All content was bilingual and developed to tie in with strands of work, forthcoming shows, calendar hooks, as well as the overall organisational objectives.
Implementation
We created monthly content plans which were added to at our weekly ‘tweet meets’ with the wider Social Media Steering Group.
As the Centre is proudly bilingual in everything it does, we seeded this content bilingually via the Centre’s social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn – being mindful of the best times to post to ensure maximum engagement.
While the majority of activity was organic, we also developed targeted social media advertising campaigns around certain shows, primarily those with a niche audience.
Measure and review
Social media analytics were shared and reviewed weekly with the Social Media Steering Group to assess the impact/success of the content and to inform and adapt future activity.
What we achieved
- 38,792,487 impressions (+71%)
- 193,470 engagements (+70%)
- 48,874 link clicks
- 99,978 new fans across all channels (+19%)
- Klout score increase from 58 to 64
What this meant for our client
With multiple stakeholders, strands of the business, and an evolving offering, with our help the Wales Millennium Centre moved away from just using social media as a broadcasting channel, to showcasing their offering through deeper engagement and two-way communication with its audiences.
