Anyone heard about LoveBox?

Victoria Park in London plays host to the LoveBox festival for two days in July. I took a look at how LoveBox engaged with potential punters in the lead up to the event weekend.

LoveBox has been going since 2002 and is now a well-established event in the London festival calendar. So does LoveBox rest on its laurels with a ‘built it and they will come approach’ or do they go all out with their engagement and activity in the lead up to the event in an effort to drive ticket sales and attendance?

Prior to the event nothing seemed exceptional or out of the ordinary in their efforts to promote and sell the event. The festival was covered in all the usual places and ticket sites from Ticket Master to GumTree. LoveBox’s partnership with Time Out saw ticket competitions running as early as April 2015, both for standard tickets and accommodation prizes as well as those treasured VIP passes. Competitions ran on many other sites as well, from What’s On TV, Metro and the Evening Standard to good old Nando’s (yum yum) and BBC radio 1Xtra. There was significant Twitter activity, encouraging people to book tickets, and ticket purchasing is featured prominently on their site as well as count downs and ticket availability updates on Instagram.

LoveBox certainly have their social presence covered – you name it, they’ve got it. They have Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, YouTube, Soundcloud, Residential Advisor as well as their very own app. So I choose to look at Instagram and Twitter to see what happened, before, during and after the event.

Activity on Instagram was moderate. The pre-event feed was filled with countdowns to the day, photos of the acts and some of the experiences as well as offers such as a discount code for Uber. During the event, there wasn’t a great deal of activity, the feed was full of fabulous shots largely focusing on festival goers, food vendors, experiences and the featured artists. LoveBox continued to post images up to a week after the event, but then all activity stops. When it comes to hashtags, #LoveBox15 saw the most relevant activity with a substantial amount from LoveBox and media or brands and it continues to see activity with festival goers tagging their pics, as does #LoveBox although you might have to wade through some rather irrelevant content!

With over 30,000 followers LoveBox shined on Twitter for us festival goers – the feed was busy, varied and interesting. In the build up to the event we were notified about tickets, set times, weather conditions and there were numerous retweets of partners and festival goers. This really helped to build the excitement and community feeling. This continued throughout the event, with non-stop conversation, retweeting of festival goers, partners and the featured artists. Things didn’t stop there, over a week after the event and the reviews, thanks and cool photos continued to be shared, reminding us all of what a great weekend it was – and showing anyone who didn’t go what they missed out on. Hmmm, I might just join all those 18 year olds there again next year too!