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The 99 Biggest Festival Twitteres

T in the Park and V Festival both sold out last week inside an hour and a half, which I’m pretty sure came as a big relief to the organisers of both events.

Ticket sales are paramount to the success of any festival and organisers are under great pressure to sell out and to sell out fast. However, in order to achieve this they need to invest a great deal of money into pr and advertising and of course most smaller festivals simply don't have the funds for such luxuries.

If only there was a marketing solution that reached millions of people and was free to use. Something that gave festivals the freedom to communicate with their audience instantaneously - in say 140 characters of less…. something a bit like, um, Twitter.

By far the most prolific users of Twitter are those in the US with 50% of the estimated 26 million global users. The UK is third, behind Brazil with a market share of 7% or 1.8m tweeps. Amongst these 1.8m people is a large and relatively untapped population of festival goers.

Considering then that Twitter is very large and very, very cheap it is somewhat surprising that most festival organisers (and even some PR agencies that tweet on their behalf) simply have no idea what they are doing – you’d have thought that they would be jumping at the chance to take full advantage of this wondrous creation.

So why are so many festivals getting is wrong? Well I can only assume that they are either unable to see the potential, they don't think that their customers use it or they simply don't know how to make it work for them.

One festival that does know how to make it work is South by South West in Texas. SXSW (more of a conference than a festival) not only has the largest number of followers, they also follow the greatest number of people. There's a disturbing arrogance amongst many festivals where they seem happy to have multitude of followers but are unwilling to follow anyone in return. OK maybe you can afford to do this if your brand is as large as Coachella's but most festivals aren't in this rather fortunate position.

Twitter isn’t a soliloquy or a monologue, rather it should be seen as an ongoing conversation. It just isn’t very nice being talked at all of the time – it gets boring. Sonisphere gets it right because they talk with their followers, they involve them - the fact that they tweet more often than any other festival (they tweet throughout the year rather than just during the run up to their event) is testament to this. In doing this they have created a strong community that whilst not being the largest, I'm sure it is one of the most responsive.

I guess social media is still fairly new to most festivals but far from being the dark art that a lot of people make it our to be, it’s actually very simple to get right. There is light at the end of the tunnel though as a few of the smarter festivals have begun to use Twitter this year to announce their line-ups – this has to be more effective than by simply spamming people’s email accounts.  So I suppose that’s a start…..

Here we have compiled a list of the 99 biggest festival twitter account according to numbers of followers:

(All details are correct at time of going to press.)

Each week The Festival Badger scours social media networks to bring you all of the news and gossip – it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it! (The views expressed are the badgers own and have nothing to do with This Festival Feeling).