How Outside Lands Doubled Their Social Impact With Email

Music festivals are highly innovative when it comes to keeping fans connected through social media, but even the most socially-connected fans miss out on some of the best posts, tweets, pins, and tags. How can your brand amplify the social buzz generated by its fans to reach and engage an even bigger audience?

The simple answer may surprise you: use email.

Outside Lands, the annual music festival that transforms San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park into a labyrinth of stages and sideshows for more than 180,000 people to enjoy over three days, decided to do just that. By using our app, StoryPorts, which was among the first to launch in the HubExchange marketplace, Outside Lands was able to collect and spread the most awe-inspiring, entertaining, and otherwise awesome Instagram photos and social media posts uploaded by its eclectic mix of music-loving fans.

Outside Lands didn’t just want to give its fans a better way to connect with one another; they wanted to connect them with the best social content from around the web. StoryPorts made it possible to gather and share the most engaging photos and videos from the event into a concise daily social email digest.

Outside Lands sent curated social media digests titled “The Morning Dew” featuring the day’s very best Instagram photos and videos—among other social media posts. These engaging emails were delivered to fans’ smartphones and inboxes the morning after each day with intriguing subject lines to drive opens. Whereas previously, fans may have only seen Instagram shots of the festival taken by their friends, email made it possible to share the most engaging photos and videos with all attendees, as well as with people around the globe via the #outsidelands hashtag.

Festivalgoers got to interact with fresh and compelling content via email they likely would have missed, thereby extending the reach and impact of Outside Lands social media campaigns.

For example, when one fan’s attention-grabbing Instagram photo started gaining popularity, it was included in Outside Lands’ social digest that fans received the next morning. By the next day, 46 percent of the total clicks to that photo came from the StoryPorts-powered social digest, resulting in more than 2,700 total Likes and an estimated 273,000 impressions. The social digest gave this photo an additional engagement lifecycle, propelling it back into the social chatter 24 hours after initial engagement had ended.

Thanks to the social digests, Outside Lands peaked at nearly 10,000 social media mentions 24 hours after the festival had ended, more than double the number of mentions the music festival received in 2012.

People love social content in email. Without a doubt, social content got significant engagement and lift­ from the Outside Lands daily social digest emails. Outside Lands’ social digest emails were responsible for 55 percent of all clicks to Outside Lands Instagram content. In addition, the social digests drove significant lifts in engagement across Tumblr (15 percent), Facebook (9 percent) and Twitter (4 percent).

To learn more about StoryPorts or to request a demo, visit storyports.com.