Three Ways Theatres Can Use Twitter Right Now

What I’m saying actually applies to entertainment venues beyond theatres, but you get the drift.

If you’re not using Twitter, you’re probably pretty sick of the hype. I use it everyday and I’m sick of it. (The hype, not twitter.) If you want to continue to ignore Twitter, that’s fine, actually. You’ll have time to catch up later.

This is more for those who marketing shows and who use Twitter, but don’t really know what to do. While I’m not going to give you a complete answer, I want to give you templates that you can use to start your thinking about what you might do on the world’s hottest and most adorable new medium.

1. Replicate your email list on Twitter. You’ve got a pretty email list, I’m sure.  In my opinion, Twitter is best used by a theatre as a way to stay in contact with its already interested customers as opposed to trying to reach a lot of new people, at least right away.  First step is that in your next email, prominently suggest to them that they should follow you on Twitter.  (And by the way, do go to the trouble of customizing your Twitter page.  It’s not hard and it shows that you’re serious and worth following.  We’ll worry about actually being worth following in a minute.)  Some percentage of your email readers will want to follow you on Twitter instead of or in addition to email.

2. Break news. When something big happens (show announcements, dates added, cast additions, special promotions, last minute show time changes), put it out on Twitter.  Remember, you’re not talking to strangers.  You’re talking to friends, so they should be interested in this kind of thing.  On the other hand, filter yourself.  A $10 discount on orchestra seats for all Wednesday in June may be important to you, but it’s pretty minor in the scheme of things.  Save your bullets for more highly relevant material.

3. Talk about what’s happening at the theatre. Amazingly, some of the most popular tweets of mine have been about the most trivial things, or so it seemed.  I had to replace a tire a couple weeks back and wrote a smart-alecky tweet about it as I sat and waited.  For some reason, people thought it was funny and wanted to talk about it.  My theory is that as the CEO of a company they like, I’m more interesting when I’m not always in ‘character’ and they can see that Goldstar is staffed by human beings.  Likewise, in a theatre, you’ve got lots of characters, literally, to draw upon for revealing little tidbits (all positive of course) about the human beings behind the shows.  You can just sprinkle these in whenever they come up, and it will make the organization sympathetic to your followers in a way that few things can.  And it’s fun.

And if you do that and keep at it, you’ll find that in just a few months, you’ll have a decent new channel to reach your loyal patrons.

And while I’m at it, you should definitely follow us!  We do some slightly more sophisticated stuff, like automated feeds of event information in each city we serve and some contests, but basically, the pattern I’ve outlined is what we do.

To follow us, go to www.twitter.com/goldstar.  Liberally borrow any of our ideas as long as you’re willing to pay us back with good ideas in the future.  Or you can buy me a drink sometime.

Either way.