English National Ballet Case Study

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Highlights

  • Grew social audience 46.8% in six months

  • Nearly doubled overall social engagement

  • Saved time researching content concepts

Overview

Founded in 1950, the English National Ballet is a touring company focused on opening the art of ballet to broader audiences. The company’s social media focus is to drive awareness of its productions across the country, and sell tickets through the venues themselves. Using Rival IQ, the English National Ballet successfully grew social audience 46.8 percent in six months, while targeting younger audience through Instagram, identifying types of content, such as video, for increased engagement.

Challenge

The social media team at the English National Ballet strives to connect with a younger audience. “Getting people interesting in ballet is not easy,” says Mathilde Menusier, digital content producer at the English National Ballet. “Through social media, however, we can show educational materials that get a more varied audience interested.”

The team sought to apply its social media approach strategically, establishing performance benchmarks and measure their performance.

“In Rival IQ I see my top posts and how they compare to each other—this is how you make faster decisions on what content to produce.”
MATHILDE MENUSIER, digital content producer, English National Ballet

Solution

Having used Rival IQ in a previous role, Menusier immediately introduced it when she joined the English National Ballet. She concluded that Rival IQ provided the strongest tracking and content performance measurement, helping them get a view of the social media landscape by monitoring their own performance, gaining insights into what content is most effective.

Results

Since introducing her new social strategy that leveraged Rival IQ, the English National Ballet grew its audience 46.8 percent in six months. More important, the team has nearly doubled its average engagement across all channels.

“Across the past six months, we have used Rival IQ to assess the audiences of our platforms, finding a slightly younger audience on Instagram and Snapchat than on Twitter and Facebook,” Menusier explains.

“Rival IQ helps me keep eye on what other ballet companies are doing in the world,” says Menusier. “It’s interesting to see what they do and how they do it. We’ve learned a lot from studying the amount of video content on Instagram.”

Using engagement insights from Rival IQ, Menusier has developed a content approach on Instagram that focuses on behind-the-scenes with the ballet company. “What I’ve learned from Rival IQ is that with Instagram, dancer-created content performs really well! Better than professional photographers, so this is what’s driving the direction we take on Instagram.”

Overall content decision-making has become much easier for the team managing social, thanks to Rival IQ. “In Rival IQ I see my top posts and how they compare to each other—this is how you make faster decisions on what content to produce,” Menusier says. “Sometimes I’ve changed my mind about ideas we’ve had because of seeing how another company did it (and it didn’t work).”

In fact, the ENB social team keeps an eye on the 15 top ballet companies in the world. “At the start we leveraged Rival IQ to determine the right number of posts per day. We’ve since watched how these companies use video. While they many have bigger budgets and higher quality, we see increasing engagement by leveraging whatever video we can, even in tight spaces and on short deadlines. It’s worth it.”

Menusier relies on the monthly report for overall social media tracking, and on a daily basis reviews the top landscape posts—what performed best across all ballet companies she tracks—and the hashtag analysis.

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