Instagram Summary of Findings

• Instagram is primarily a visual platform and one that evokes a strong sense of time and place which can be exploited further to simultaneously localize and visualize activities and events.
• Authenticity is a key dimension of the visual communication on this platform (authentic presentations of self and others, front stage and backstage portayls), and so playing with artifice and authenticity (as in Midsummer Night’s Dream adaptation) may not attract or appeal Instagram users.
• If celebrities are mobilized to help raise the profile of activities, they should be chosen to fit with the audience demographic and interests rather than to fit the activities.
• The different strengths and modalities of platforms need to be taken into account when designing strategies for those platforms. It is important to be aware of the communicative conventions in the various social media.
• While radical and experimental, the way A Midsummer Night’s Dream was staged does not seem to have deeply engaged the audience, possibly because it stepped too far from the accepted style of Instagram discourse.
• There exist successful models of Instagram use (GI and Skam being cited) which can potentially be used to inform future BC models of engagement.

Instagram Summary of Recommendations

• It is important to work with the accepted conventions of platforms like Instagram in order to enable active participation. The Midsummer play in Instagram may have been innovative, creative and well designed, but it did not resonate as expected with the audience. There is presumably room to experiment within the boundaries of convention, but there's no point in being ground breaking if no-one's looking.
• The use of social media around big events such as Shakespeare Lives should be building on long-term engagement. It appeared that that BC were not experienced or established Instagram users, and so trying to engage only with one-off, big ticket events betrays a lack of feel for the medium.
• It may be valuable to think clearly about what the engagement is intended to achieve. A smaller audience who is drawn into a deep engagement is a different thing from a larger audience who merely receive information. Is the aim to inform or engage? Both are legitimate goals, but require different strategies.
• The message needs to be adapted to the audience using the medium. A comparison is drawn with the use of Instagram by the drama team behind Skam, but this may work because the drama is aimed at the same demographic who use Instagram; it doesn't follow that taking Skam's model will yield the same engagement with a different audience. The attempt to adapt Midsummer Nights Dream to Instagram created a sense that the interpretation was driven by the medium, rather than the audience.
• Don't try to do too much: do a smaller number of things well. An output which contains both schoolchildren's selfies and rap interpretations of Shakespeare may dilute a message, particularly before there is an established BC presence on the particular platform.