Instant Win on Instagram

A case study about the year-long effort I made to increase a theater’s Instagram presence.

The Situation

When I began working at Dallas Children’s Theater (DCT) I wanted to increase the theater’s following on Instagram. I believed it was the perfect platform to highlight the visual beauty of live theater and build a strong community with actors, parents, and other patrons. Building a presence on Instagram leveraged the images captured during performances, field trips, academy classes, readings, and other events to illustrate the power of live theater.

The Solution

The Marketing Director and Senior Director of Communications and Philanthropy were open to me taking on the responsibility of incorporating Instagram into the regular social media schedule. I based the platform’s original tone from that used on the theater’s Facebook page, but established a unique voice for the platform. To reach as many relevant users as possible on the platform I focused on adding hashtags related to theater, family, school, subscribers, Dallas, and seasonal themes to each post.

Eventually this platform was integrated completely into social media strategy, and I researched scheduling platforms that could work for our needs. I signed the theater up for a Hootsuite account, which gave me the freedom to schedule Instagram and Twitter content while maintaining messaging across the platforms; my team decided it was best practice for us to keep scheduling Facebook posts natively on the platform.

With a streamlined process for posting, my attention turned toward engagement. In order to grow the follower count, I used the Explore page to perform location- and interest-based searches for posts from users featuring children. I liked and commented on user posts to bring DCT’s friendly brand personality to their attention. I followed some accounts to show the theater’s investment in the user’s lives which drew in many followers.

The Result

After one year of measurement, the DCT account saw 51 percent growth in followers. Over that time, the account’s reach doubled and impressions and engagements on posts grew nearly 50 percent.

After three complete seasons I helped increase the theater’s followers by 187 percent.