Fun Social Media Event Marketing With A Green Screen!
We were invited to have a presence at the recent Twist Fair, a twice annual alternative craft fair in Northampton MA. We ended up coming up with an exciting way to integrate attendees experience of actually being at the event with the event’s social media presence, driving a lot of traffic to the event’s Facebook page in the process. We achieved this by taking attendees photos at the event, editing the photos to look like attendees were actually in a number of different bizarre locations and posting the pictures to Facebook throughout the day.
We achieved this by setting up a green screen at the event. As attendees arrived they were asked if they wanted to participate, and were then offered their choice of backgrounds (We made backgrounds depicting The Moon, The Beach and The Underworld, to go with Twist’s fun, alt-show vibe.) They could also pick from an assortment of goofy props, which helped get them in the spirit of taking a fun photo. We then edited the backgrounds of the photos in Photoshop and uploaded them to Facebook on-site, throughout the day while the event was happening. You can see the full Facebook album of photos we took here, in addition to some of my favorites being displayed in this blog entry.
Browsing the Facebook album will show you pretty quickly what a great social media tool this is. By telling the subjects of the photographs that “The photo will be on our Facebook page within the next couple of hours”, we were able to drive much of the door traffic to the Facebook page. Almost immediately, many of the photos had been tagged and shared by the subjects. When this happens, their entire friend lists see the photo in their News Feeds and are taken to Twist’s Facebook page to view them. The Twist Facebook page saw a huge spike in both their Likes and Daily Active Users during the event, with new Likes, tagging and sharing still happening to the photos for many days afterword. Having the images be posted to the Facebook page throughout the day also kept Twist in people’s news feeds, reminding them that the event was happening and they should attend.
In terms of what the green screen contributed to the event itself, looking at the faces of the folks in the photos makes it obvious that the shoots were a total blast. The promotion was very well received by attendees, getting them active and involved in a fun way that added to the quirky, creative feel that Twist has already established. But this same approach could certainly be adapted for more (and less!) formal settings. We’re looking very forward to doing it again some time!
