8 Basic Mistakes Orchestras are Making on Social Media

It’s been great to see orchestras finally getting round to using digital more and taking social media seriously… a bit late but hey.

Before COVID-19, some orchestras had large social media followings which is great, but if we’re being honest with ourselves this was more due to orchestras having large reputations and being live event organisations with thousands of visitors every year, and less to do with… erm… actually having good content and being good at social media.

Despite being multimillion-dollar arts organisations with dedicated marketing teams, the vast majority of orchestras make the same basic mistakes on social media that could be spotted after a quick Google of “top social media mistakes” or “how to do social media well”. 

What this means is that not only are they creating bad content, they’re also largely getting outperformed by individuals creating content in their bedroom with a phone, an internet connection, and a bit of creativity.

I thought it would be good to look at some of these basic mistakes pretty much all orchestras are making online. And in the interest of not pointing out individual orchestras, all examples from now on will be for the totally fictional Narnia Symphony Orchestra (NSO for short).

Posting the same content on all platforms

We get it, orchestra admin teams are busy. It can be incredibly tempting to post the same content on all platforms. Not only posting about the same thing at exactly the same time, but also copy and pasting the same text. This is bad for 2 reasons.

First of all, as there is some cross over between of your audience on platforms it’s going to look… well… boring. As an audience member, I don’t want to be bombarded with the same message over and over again.

 Secondly, and more importantly, each platform is different. TOTALLY different. Social media is used as a catch all term, and as a result we forget that we need to be totally different in creating content specifically for each platform. 

You wouldn’t say “we need to create an advert for traditional” and then try and put out an identical advert on TV, radio, and print newspapers as that would sound mad. It’s exactly the same for social media. The difference between Facebook and Twitter is as big as the difference between TV and radio.

Then on top of that, you’ll have different audiences on different platforms who will want to engage in different ways. So, create unique content for each platform that takes into account the platforms nuances and features, and is aimed at its specific audience.

Posting the wrong size and shape image

As we just mentioned, each platform is very different. This becomes more important when thinking about the shape and size images we use on them as, surprisingly, they all have display images differently.

The main mistake orchestras make for this is on Instagram. For example, the Narnia Symphony Orchestra’s Instagram is full of lots of nice images from a photographer they hired in and they’re all landscape. Pretty much their whole wall is landscape photos. Great right? No. 

Just because you can post a landscape photo on Instagram doesn’t mean you should. Any 5  minute Google search on “how to be good at Instagram” will tell you images should either be 4:5 ratio portrait, or a 1:1 square. Here’s why.

Most people fly through looking at their Instagram feed, swiping through and consuming content at speed. This experience is vertical. So, by making a portrait (or vertical) image, you take up as much of the screen as possible when someone is scrolling down. A landscape image.

Hashtags

We all know hashtags are a thing. People who aren’t on social media know the word hashtags. Hashtags are incredibly useful and powerful. But, with great power comes great responsibility, and that responsibility is knowing how and when to use them properly.

 For example, even though hashtags do exist on Facebook, they’re not used commonly and rarely searched for, so have to be used sparingly and deliberately in posts so not to look spammy and as if you’ve just copy and pasted a tweet.

On the flip side, the NSO not having a hashtag strategy for Instagram and either using too niche hashtags, too few, or in some cases not any at all, will mean that posts will find it even easy discovered by people outside their main followers

Talking about yourself too much

I’m sure you might have seen a post like this as the caption for a social media video…

“John Doe, NSO First Violin, and Jane Doe, NSO Cellist, play some Bach
Watch more in the NSO lockdown series: www.nso.narnia/lockdown #NSOlockdown”

Then the video has a giant NSO logo on it and loads of branding…


Funnily enough, the audience realised it was by the NSO as the post has the profile name “Narnia Symphony Orchestra” and the NSO logo as the profile photo at the top like all posts on social media. All the extra branding is WAY over the top and makes it look like spam and… well… a bit crap.

I get that orchestras want to clearly brand things, but maybe tone it down a tad.

Oh, while I’m here, this seems like a great time to talk about voice. Orchestras switching from third to first person is a must. Give “we” and “our” a shot in posts as if you were talking to people normal

Shit images

Ok, I know this is a bit blunt…  sometimes the images can be… a bit shit.

Two separate issues. The main one that amazes me is using images that are really REALLY low quality. I mean those that are painfully blurry that anyone would notice as being rubbish.

Then there is the other side of take bad photos. Weird angles, not telling stories, out of focus, not showing anything, badly frame. All the things that make photos just a bit naff and make it look like they’ve been 

On the one hand we’re multimillion-dollar arts organisations with the highest possible artistic standards on stage, and on the other we’re happy to use incredibly low resolution, pixelated, blurry, crap photos that look like they were taken by my nan on a blackberry from 2009.

Just listing events – being overly promotional

There’s a huge temptation for marketing departments to focus entirely on selling, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing as we have concert halls to fill. But how many social feeds for orchestras have you seen like this:

“Tickets on sale now”

“Buy our CD”

“Season launch – buy now”

Then repeated over and over again. (This is especially true on Twitter)

You’d normally think that this is good, but the thing is, audiences don’t go on social media to see adverts. They go on for quality content entertainment.

Great news… we all work in the entertainment industry. So instead of banging on about sales, orchestras should focus on creating audience focussed content to build connections and relationships, and then carefully insert sales.

Not posting enough

 Simple. Orchestras don’t post enough on social media.

Here’s an example of a week in July. The most a UK symphony orchestra posted on Facebook was 26 times, with the average being 10.2.

In the same week, Manchester United posted 120 times, and Liverpool FC 146 times.

Both classical music and football are performance focussed industries, and both examples only had one performance that week. And yet football teams have managed to find ways of creating so much more content than orchestras.

The usual push back from this is “football clubs have so much more money to do this” but I really don’t think that’s the issue. Social media is free to use, and the thing football clubs have excelled at is putting systems in place to capture, curate, and create meaningful content at scale. You don’t need a large budget or team to do this.

Oh, and for a classical music comparison, Classic FM post around 80 times a week on Facebook, so there is an appetite for what we’re selling.

On the flip side, by not posting enough it also means that it’s easy for any individual or ensemble with a smart phone to outperform an established symphony orchestra with all its resources.

Hiring social media staff “because they’re young”

Ok, this isn’t a mistake on social media, but it’s related and a pet peeve of mine so I’m adding it as a bonus. My blog, my rules. 

I’m still struck by how many times I’ve had conversations with orchestras and arts organisations about social media where they say something along the lines of “oh it’s great as we’ve hired X to do our digital as they’re young and understands all of this social media stuff”

That’s the same as opening a large restaurant and saying “we’ve hired Pierre as our head chef as he’s French and must know a lot about all this cooking thing”. True, there’s a chance he’ll be into cooking more, and may even be passionate about it, but it doesn’t mean he’s qualified to run a large scale restaurant kitchen just because he’s French.

The skills of creating digital content and online marketing are specialist ones, and being successful at social media is hard. Being young doesn’t inherently make someone good at social media. So you should recruit those with a proven track record of creating quality content, and not appoint someone just because they’re young and said phrases like “Instagram reels” that you don’t understand but sound like they’re something to do with social.