Digital Lab. The Palace Theatre and the Opera House Manchester. Blog 2. Using Instagram TV.
Digital Lab. The Palace Theatre and the Opera House Manchester. Blog 2. Using Instagram TV.
By
Abigail Henry
SUMMARY
The second blog by Abigail Henry, Marketing Communications Officer at The Palace Theatre and the Opera House Manchester as part of her Fellowship at AMA Digital Lab.
What challenges do we face at the Palace and Opera House Theatre?
When the theatre is quiet and we have no shows, our doors are closed to the public. But that
doesn’t mean we’re not getting ready to bring exciting performances to Manchester’s audiences!
This has influenced how I’m using the AMA’s Digital Lab programme and the experiments I am
required to run.
My experiments focus on how I can use digital media to communicate to and connect with our audience when our doors are not open.
How will our second experiment differ to the first?
My first experiment tested how our audience reacted to a post show email that contained an
interview with Susannah Edgley (The Exorcist) and a ‘thank you for visiting’ headline.
My second experiment was supposed to follow on from this test; looking at the engagement levels and if these changed because the content was from a different genre of show. The content created for experiment two was a backstage interview with Priscilla Queen of the Dessert’s Joe McFadden.
Did we achieve what we set out to do?
The interview was scheduled to happen during the week of the show, but I wasn’t able to turn around the edit until the week after. Because there wasn’t much time between setting up the
interview and the date when the email should have been sent, I was unable to schedule the email to go to the relevant data without compromising other campaigns. So I decided to use the second experiment to
decided to compare publishing the video on Instagram TV (IGTV) instead of publishing directly to Instagram’s feed.
What happened?
Our in-house backstage interviews are published across all of our active platforms to maximise reach. Susannah Edgley’s interview was cut to just a teaser, published to the Instagram feed, andthen people were directed to a link for the full video available on YouTube. The teaser generated 500+ views on Instagram and contributed 20.8% of the 256 views that the video had on YouTube. Both Instagram and YouTube need a viewer to watch for 3 seconds for their engagement to count as a view.
The Joe McFadden content was published, as a whole, to IGTV. This makes the video available on the
feed too. To date, the video has generated 1000+ views. Doubling the results of the first experiment on the Instagram video and surpassing the first experiments total views across both YouTube and Instagram.
What next?
As a result of the experiment, it is clear that there is value to publishing backstage content to IGTV instead of cross-posting. This may be because the users wish to stay within Instagram (I’d like to do more testing around this to assess if this is the case). If this is the case, IGTV will become the way to distribute our backstage content on Instagram.
Now that the second experiment has been completed it’s time to wind down for Christmas, but I’m
looking forward to continuing the experiments with digital media in the New Year.
Abigail Henry, Marketing Communications Officer at The Palace Theatre and the Opera House Manchester
Resource type: Articles | Published: 2020
