Live Nation: Community Building

Objective

While many brands focus on building the largest Fan base on social networking sites (Facebook and Twitter), Live Nation wanted to create the most engaged live music social community on both platforms organically, without dedicated advertising support.

Live Nation’s goals included:

• Increasing organic growth of community and Fan base on Facebook and Twitter
• Creating awareness around upcoming events/tours
• Generating high- quality traffic to LiveNation.com

Solution

Context Optional worked closely with Live Nation to help the brand develop a full-fledged engagement strategy to organically grow its live music Fan base using a three-pronged strategy:

• Create unique and creative content
• Develop a social tone for the brand
• Daily community management focused on both engagement and customer service

As a result of this approach, Live Nation’s vibrant community of live music lovers and artist fans has thrived on Facebook and Twitter—despite the lack of advertising support. The brand attributes its impressive growth on social entirely to social interaction.

One of the key focuses for Live Nation’s social strategy was to create and maintain an authentic voice across all of its communities. Context Optional worked closely with Live Nation’s social team to build and uphold its authentic voice.

Live Nation’s social efforts have included:

• Leveraging its highly-coveted prizing pool of tickets and merchandise
• Launching both artist-specific and general live music promotions using Twitter’s viral ReTweet feature to increase brand awareness and reward active users
• Using the power of Context Optional’s geo-targeting capabilities (part of the Social Marketing Suite’s Publishing module) to push messages to specific relevant local areas
• Launching Fan polls in the form of cutting-edge Stream applications that drove over 600 interactions per message
• Creating regular status updates such as a Monday Pop Quiz, which offered challenging music trivia, and both engaged the fans increased sharing

Results

Live Nation’s Fan size grew from 95,000 Facebook fans to over 520,000 and 65,000 Twitter followers to over 200,000 on both their national and local pages in a 9-month period. Engagement on the Live Nation national Facebook page went up 1180% in this same time period.