Let’s get digital #ADA

I’m almost into the third month of my ADA Fellowship and it’s certainly given me plenty to think about and work towards… 

My first experiment, to attract a younger audience to one of our Live Jazz in Libraries events by giving out money off vouchers at a student event, didn’t deliver the results I’d hoped for.  While this was disappointing, it wasn’t a huge surprise as the experiment had focused on a very small target audience. 

After a very helpful chat with my mentor, who advised pursuing ‘active marketing’ techniques to engage with potential customers rather than passive marketing techniques, I decided for my next experiment to go digital! 

Aim: To raise awareness of our Live Jazz in Libraries events and attract a younger audience to these events through social media engagement. 

Experiment: Using social media to engage with potential new audiences admittedly isn’t something new or revolutionary and we have previously used Facebook and Twitter for promoting our jazz events, however, for this experiment I decided to use our Instagram account to actively engage with potential audiences to raise awareness. 

How:  

• Research local music venues that host jazz events and follow their accounts and their followers accounts.  
• Find relevant hashtags and use them on posts and follow people who have used relevant hashtags.  
• Like relevant posts and @mention people to increase awareness and encourage engagement with our account. 

 Measurement:   

• Look at how many new followers we get to our account and how many @mentions we get. 
• Look audience survey findings to identify the ages of those attending. 

Our next jazz event takes place in mid-December, so hopefully my next blog will be about the successes of this experiment!  

Jaysika Dennis (Communications and Marketing) at Inspire: Culture, Learning and Libraries