Case study
Light Night Wigan 2024.
How we built a brand-new social media audience for a free light art festival and helped it sell 30,000 tickets.
- Client
- Things That Go On Things
- Platforms
- Facebook and Instagram
- What we did
- Strategy, content creation, community management and live coverage
Photo courtesy of Nick Fairhurst
The results.
Across Facebook and Instagram.
The brief
Things That Go On Things asked us to manage and grow the social media for Light Night Wigan, an annual light art festival created in collaboration with Wigan Council, Light Up The North and Arts Council England. It’s free to attend and showcases the work of light artists.
2024 was the first year the festival had its own social media channels, so we were building an audience from scratch. Before then, it had only been promoted through the channels of Wigan Council and Things That Go On Things.
Our approach
Building a local community was key to driving ticket sales and attendance. The festival already drew big crowds, so the goal was to beat previous years on both ticket sales and engagement.
We worked closely with Things That Go On Things and Wigan Council, sharing content through the Wigan Council and Visit Wigan pages to reach even more local people.
What we did
We created a social media plan that put the artists and their installations front and centre. Spotlighting their work and the stories behind it built excitement and got people talking to the artists directly. Because the installations change every year, this gave past visitors a reason to come back and new audiences a reason to come for the first time.
To build interest, we made sneak-peek videos from past festival footage, pairing clips of the installations with the artists’ own voiceovers. These videos helped us reach more than 320,000 views across Facebook and Instagram during the build-up and after the festival.
During the festival, we combined live Instagram Stories, with polls and questions for people at the event and at home, with live streams and daily round-up reels. The live streams meant people who couldn’t get tickets could still experience the festival from home, building anticipation for the next one.
Community management played a big part too. We answered messages and comments about tickets and timings quickly and in a friendly way, in keeping with the welcoming spirit of the festival.
The content.
Becca at Silly Goose came recommended by a friend, and instantly at our first meeting we knew it would be a match made in heaven. She asked all the right questions to understand our festival, and has built the brand with us.
Things That Go On ThingsLight Night Wigan
More of our work.
Video-first content that helped the festival sell out in a matter of weeks.
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