I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification, his book on the appalling behaviour of the Big Tech companies and I got to thinking about arts centres and arts marketing in general. I’d love to know if the implications of what he’s suggesting are real so here it is.
Facebook (and Tik Tok and insta etc) and Google changed the way they work so that they could maximise the money they could extract from advertisers and users. As a result there are no longer any guarantees that an ad you pay for is even shown to its intended market and no guarantee that the content you post is seen by your followers or interested people. The algorithm on the feed means that the people following you see less and less of your posts.
Facebook organic page reach dropped from around 6–8% to 2–3% after the 2018 News Feed change, and the 2020–2023 shift to algorithmic Instagram feeds cut organic reach for non-Reel content by 50%+. Also, paid social has got dearer: average cost per click across Facebook and Instagram rose roughly 89% between 2019 and 2024.
In other words, if you’re relying on social media and online ads to sell tickets you’re more than likely just burning money.
Yes, but what about all those engagement metrics and charts we can get from our social media platforms?
Doctorow argues convincingly that platform analytics are designed to make spending feel effective and to keep it flowing. Impressions, reach, engagement rate are all designed to measure the platform’s activity, not the outcome. Sure, your post may well have reached 12,000 people but how many of them bought a ticket? This “conversion rate” is the only valuable metric – everything else is vanity. If you don’t have a way to track that engagement to your box office software then it’s not really telling you anything. It’s just noise masquerading as insight.
Interestingly, email conversion rates at 1–5% are roughly 10 times organic social conversion rates which tend to be 0.1–0.5 and email has a higher return on investment.
If Doctorow is correct then the principle purpose of your social media content strategy is simply to be there if someone goes looking for it, it’s a coms channel, just don’t expect it to sell any tickets, don’t expect posts to be shown to your followers, don’t expect ads to reach their target audience.
About 15 years ago I ran a €50 Facebook add campaign and sold out an underperforming venue in two days on a tour. It feels like those days are over.
Love to hear people’s experiences around this.