Social media checklist for arts and culture festivals.
Social media for arts festivals is about much more than posting what’s on. From accessibility and local reach to video, community engagement and reporting, here are the things worth thinking about before, during and after your event.
By Becca Wheble9-minute read 5th October 2026
Light Night Wigan 2024. Photo: Nick Fairhurst
When you’re marketing an arts or culture festival, social media has quite a big job to do.
You might need to build awareness of an event people have never heard of, introduce artists and installations, answer practical questions, sell tickets, encourage people to visit a town or city centre and, eventually, prove the impact of the event to stakeholders or funders.
So, where do you start?
Here’s our social media checklist for arts festivals and cultural events, covering some of the things that we think are worth considering before, during and after your event.
1 Make accessibility part of your social media process
Accessibility shouldn’t be something you think about once the content has already been created.
Add alt text to images wherever the platform allows it, caption your video content and make sure important information isn’t communicated through a graphic alone.
Alt text is primarily there to make visual content accessible to people using screen readers, but it can also give platforms additional context around what an image contains. By alt-texting your images, you can feed in keywords which can also relate to social SEO and help your content get discovered.
For an arts festival in particular, where your feed is likely to be very visual, it’s a simple step to build into your content process from the beginning.
The disability charity Sense has a useful guide to making your social media more accessible (opens in a new tab).
Try this: Add alt text and captions while you’re creating each post, not afterwards.
2 Talk about the people behind the festival
Your audience will naturally see the public-facing side of the event, such as the artworks, performances, installations and hopefully a great day or evening out.
But there’s normally a much bigger story behind it.
Talk about your curators. Introduce the organisations involved. Show some of the work happening behind the scenes. Explain why a particular artist has been commissioned or how a piece of work has come together.
This doesn’t mean every post needs to become a mini documentary about your organisation. It’s about occasionally widening the story beyond “here’s something you can come and see”.
It gives people a better understanding of the work that goes into creating an arts festival and, importantly, shows the passion behind it.
Try this: Plan a post that introduces a curator, partner or artist, and the story behind their work.
3 Actively engage with your audience
Social media is designed to be social, and this includes engaging with your audience.
Respond to comments, answer questions from your audience and keep an eye on your messages, particularly as the event gets closer.
For a lot of people, Instagram or Facebook will be one of the first places they go if they want to know whether something is accessible, whether they need a ticket, where they can park or whether an event is suitable for children.
Your comments can effectively become another customer service channel.
Engagement also gives social platforms useful signals (opens in a new tab) about how people are interacting with your content, so don’t treat publishing the post as the end of the job.
Try this: Check your comments and messages every day in the run-up to the festival.
4 Think about where your bio link is sending people
What is the most useful next step for somebody who lands on your profile? It’s how they learn more about your event and how to attend.
If you’re promoting a completely free arts festival, it might simply be your website where visitors can explore the programme, locations and practical information.
If your festival has several different actions (maybe it’s free activities alongside ticketed events), a link-in-bio page can make more sense.
It gives your audience one place to choose what they need. For example:
- Viewing the full programme
- Booking tickets
- Checking accessibility information
- Finding travel information
- Exploring different festival locations
Most link-in-bio platforms will also give you click data, which means you can see what people are actually interested in rather than simply how many people visited your profile.
Try this: Look at your profile as a first-time visitor would. Is the next step obvious?
5 Location tag your content
For a place-based event, location is a pretty important piece of context.
If you’re running an arts festival in London, Liverpool, Manchester or anywhere else, tell the platform that.
Use relevant location tags and naturally include your town, city or venue within your captions and video content.
For example, instead of a Reel simply saying:
“The countdown is on…”
You might lead with:
“[x] town centre will look a little different in two weeks…”
You’re immediately giving both the viewer and the platform more information about who that content could be relevant to.
Location tags can also help your posts appear when people explore content associated with a particular place.
What about hashtags?
We wouldn’t recommend spending half an hour trying to come up with 30 different variations of #ThingsToDo. Instagram now limits posts and Reels to five hashtags (opens in a new tab) anyway.
Hashtags can still help categorise content and provide another relevance signal, so there’s nothing wrong with using a few relevant ones. But they should support your content rather than be your discoverability strategy.
Focus first on clear post copy, relevant keywords, location tags and making it obvious what your content is actually about. Current Instagram SEO guidance (opens in a new tab) considers information including captions, profile text, location and engagement alongside hashtags when understanding and surfacing content.
Try this: Name your town or city in the first line of your next caption or video.
6 Ask what each post is actually trying to do
Your overall festival objective might be simple:
Get as many people through the door as possible.
That doesn’t mean every social media post needs to say “BOOK NOW”.
People will discover your festival at different points.
Someone might see an artist Reel having never heard of the event before. Someone else might already know exactly what it is and just needs to know when tickets are released.
Your content should cover those different stages.
Never heard of it
Artist Reels and spotlights that grab attention
Getting interested
Locations, FAQs and posts that build excitement
Ready to go
Ticket releases, dates and the practical details
An artist spotlight, for example, can be brilliant awareness content – but don’t assume your audience already knows the artist. Explain what they’re creating, why it’s interesting and what somebody visiting the festival will actually experience.
Other posts might be there specifically to drive ticket sales, answer FAQs, explain locations or simply build excitement.
Give every post a job.
Try this: Before you post, write down the one job that post has to do. We tend to categorise these in our social plans, so we know whether a post is for engagement, awareness, link clicks or conversion.
Light Night Wigan 2024. Photo: Nick Fairhurst
7Video content is everywhere, for a reason
Some of the strongest social engagement we’ve seen around events has come from video content, particularly short-form video content across Reels and TikTok.
For Light Night Wigan 2025, a video-first plan helped the festival reach 1.27 million views across Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
Reels and short-form video give you an opportunity to show the scale, atmosphere and experience of an arts festival in a way a static graphic sometimes can’t.
Think beyond views when you’re reviewing performance, too. Look at:
- Average watch time
- Shares
- Saves
- Reach
- Profile visits
- Link clicks
Saves and shares can be particularly interesting for event content, as they’re a good indicator of deep engagement. You may not be able to see the person who physically engaged (like you would a ‘like’ or comment), but they’re meaningful engagement signals, especially for Instagram.
Someone saving a “five things to see this weekend” Reel might be planning to come back to it later. Someone sharing it might be sending it to the person they’re planning to attend with.
Bottom line: not every valuable interaction ends with somebody publicly liking or commenting on the post.
Try this: Check the saves and shares on your Reels, not just the views.
8 Use social analytics to support future funding reports
Your social media reporting can tell you much more than how many followers you gained.
Depending on the platform, you may be able to report on reach, impressions, engagement, video views and audience demographics such as age, gender and location.
That becomes particularly useful when your event has wider audience objectives.
For example, if one of your goals is to reach more people within the local area, your audience location data can help demonstrate whether your social media activity is reaching them. It also gives you evidence to shape the following year’s campaign:
- What is our audience breakdown?
- Which videos were saved?
- Where was your audience based?
- When did awareness start increasing?
If future funding or stakeholder reporting matters to your festival, decide what you want to measure before the campaign starts rather than trying to piece it together afterwards.
Try this: Write down three questions you want your end-of-festival report to answer.
9 Consider paid social for local audience growth
You don’t necessarily need an enormous advertising budget to support an arts festival.
Meta advertising can be particularly useful for local events because audiences can be targeted geographically around the area you want to reach.
That could mean supporting organic activity with a campaign focused on people living within a relevant radius of your event, or giving additional visibility to key ticketing or programme announcements.
Paid and organic social don’t need to work separately either.
Someone might first discover the festival through an advert, visit the Instagram page, watch a few Reels and then come back a week later to book.
We see time and time again, that wider journey is worth considering when you evaluate your campaign.
Try this: Put a small budget behind your biggest programme or ticket announcement.
10 Make use of collab posts
Arts and culture festivals rarely happen in isolation. You might be working with local venues, artists, cultural organisations, councils, BIDs or community groups… many of which already have their own established audiences.
Instagram Collab posts (opens in a new tab) allow multiple accounts to be attached to the same post, helping one piece of content appear across the collaborating profiles and reach their combined audiences.
They’re particularly useful for venue announcements, artist content and major festival updates.
Don’t just build an audience from scratch when there are already relevant communities around the event.
Try this: Invite a partner venue to share your next big announcement as a Collab post.
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Get in touchA quick arts festival social media checklist.
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All 10 ticked off. That’s every light on.
Before your next campaign, check:
- Read Tip 1
- Read Tip 2
- Read Tip 3
- Read Tip 4
- Read Tip 5
- Read Tip 6
- Read Tip 7
- Read Tip 8
- Read Tip 9
- Read Tip 10
Anything you tick while reading shows up here too. Your ticks are saved in this browser, so they’ll be here next time.
You don’t necessarily need to do everything at once.
The important thing is that your social media activity has a reason behind it, and that you’re thinking about the full journey from somebody discovering your festival for the first time through to attending it, talking about it and hopefully coming back again.
FAQs: Social media for arts and culture festivals.
Should an arts festival have its own social media accounts?
In most cases, yes.
Even if your festival is organised or funded by a council, BID or wider organisation, having dedicated social media accounts gives audiences one central place to find festival information.
It also makes reporting much easier. Instead of your festival content sitting amongst unrelated posts from a larger organisation, you can properly understand your festival’s audience, reach, engagement and content performance.
Partner organisations can still play a big role by sharing and collaborating with your festival accounts.
For example, Light Night Wigan launched its own channels in 2024, and shared content through other local pages to reach even more local people.
What should an arts festival post on social media between events?
You don’t need to start a 12-month countdown to next year’s festival as soon as this year’s finishes.
Keep your content broader during quieter periods. Share community engagement projects, artist updates, behind-the-scenes activity, relevant local cultural news, throwbacks and any work your organisation is doing throughout the year.
Consistency is useful, but that doesn’t mean maintaining peak festival-season posting levels all year round.
Are hashtags still important for festival social media?
They can still be useful, particularly relevant branded, community or location hashtags, but they shouldn’t be your entire discovery strategy.
Instagram now limits posts and Reels to five hashtags.
Use a small number where they’re genuinely relevant and spend more time making sure your captions, video content, profile and location information clearly explain what your festival is, where it is and who it’s for.
Which social media platforms are best for arts festivals?
There isn’t one platform that every festival needs to prioritise.
Instagram and Facebook can work particularly well for visual event content, community information and local audiences, while TikTok can be useful for short-form video and discovery.
Your audience data should ultimately guide where you spend your time. It is better to run two channels well than stretch a small event team across every social platform because you feel like you should be there.
How do you measure social media success for an arts festival?
Start with the objective.
If awareness is the priority, look at metrics such as reach, impressions and video views. If you’re promoting ticketed activity, website visits and ticket sales become more important.
You can also look at saves, shares, comments, audience location and demographic data to build a wider picture of who your campaign reached and how they interacted with it.
For funded arts and culture events, this information can also provide useful evidence for post-event evaluation and future funding applications.
Becca is the founder of Silly Goose Digital. She’s worked in social media marketing since 2018, and now specialises in arts festivals and cultural events. Find out more about what we do.
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