Promo Post with the Concert Lineup (only 24 likes)

Wow. This has got to be one of the most successful social media campaigns I have seen. Contact Winter Music Festival is a fairly new project started by Blueprint Events, Vancouver’s biggest Electronic Dance Music promotions company. The precursor to  Contact Festival was the boxing day Avicii Concert in 2011 (a world famous DJ). The following year on the same date Blueprint announced Contact Festival, with Deadmau5. After putting in the ground work Blueprint is now working on turning the event into full 2 day music festival at BC place. The campaign for this new and improved festival started in September of this year 4 months before the event.

Real Content from an artist “An Interview with Diplo” (33 likes)

On August 14th blueprint made a new facebook page for Contact Festival a separate from their existing Blueprint Events page that already has 24,000 followers as well as a Contact festival Instagram and Twitter account.What I am so intrigued about is the rate at which both the page and Instagram account were able to gain followers.After only four months the Facebook page has gained 10,000 followers and the Instagram 2,400 while only 500 on twitter. This is so incredible because it took blueprint roughly 6 years to gain 10,000 followers on their original Blueprint events page. They have been able to efficiently transfer existing likes to the new page and gain momentum exceptionally quickly. The Instagram followers are especially impressive because Instagram accounts don’t grow virally.

So how did they do it? The as a designer the content that is being pumped out for the campaign on facebook and Instagram isn’t mind blowing in terms of design. There is no long form content such as write-ups or bios. And the photos from the feed are just regular photos. So what is making it tick so fast? The timing and abundance of content being pumped out everyday sometimes 4 posts a day is what is driving this train combined with a number of contents. Every day Instagram and page pump out 2 or 3 pieces of content usually one piece about one of the artists, one that is pure promo, a cool graphic or animated logo, and one more that is a contest. Together they work quite well. The contest incentives the existing followers to like and share the post in order to win prizes, this drives its viral spread, but when people check out the page, the promo content explains what is happening and the artist content is provides the meat real quality content to watch or listen too.