By: Sarah Borchardt, Katy Edgington, Brittany Melo, Maddie McClenaghan and Blair Paley

Introduction The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is held annually in two consecutive weekends at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, Calif., during the spring season. Since 2001, it has been sponsored by Goldenvoice, a subsidiary of AEG Live, but was co-founded by Rick Van Santen and Paul Tollett in 1999. The festival features music genres of a wide range including hip-hop, rap, indie, rock, and electronic dance, along with dozens of food venders and art sculptures and installations around the venue. Coachella provides a diverse musical lineup of both new, emerging musicians, and well-known and established artists and DJs. 1

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival is named the most profitable and most famous music festival in its industry and is continuously growing every year. An estimated $704 million of overall economic activity is generated by businesses and consumers within the two Coachella events along with its “sister event” Stagecoach. Last year, there were 99,000 people in attendance for the six days of Coachella. 2

The event is sponsored by not only Goldenvoice but also a number of other large companies: Absolut, American Express, Cupcake Vineyards, H&M, Heineken, JBL, New Era, Pandora Jewelry, Perverse Sunglasses, SiriusXM, Tag Heuer, and T-Mobile. 3

The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival mainly uses social media to relay information regarding ticket sales and upcoming important dates for the event. The main channels used are Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Although this is the main use for the social media channels for Coachella, photos are posted often during festival hours featuring the performers, art and people in attendance of the event. The festival targets the millennial age group - specifically high school and college students on the West Coast. The largest audience in attendance every year are individuals between the ages of 16-28. This is also the age group that social media has the biggest impact on.

1"Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival." Wikipedia . Wikimedia Foundation, 18 Oct. 2016. Web. 26 Oct. 2016. 2Faughnder, Ryan. "Coachella by the Numbers: A Breakdown of the Festival's $700-million Impact." Los Angeles Times . Los Angeles Times, 22 Apr. 2016. Web. 26 Oct. 2016. 3 "Coachella | Sponsors." Coachella . N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Oct. 2016.

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We created a social media audit and conversation analysis for The Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in order to compare its online presence to its competitors: Sasquatch and Lollapalooza. We believe the results and recommendations derived from our research will help the company not only grow its social media follower base but also maintain its online presence throughout the year and engage with its publics more consistently. Method We chose to conduct our social media audit through Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival’s most popular social media channels: Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. We believe that in order to accurately determine the quality and success of Coachella’s presence, we must compare what it is doing compared to some of its strongest competitors - Lollapalooza and Sasquatch. For each individual music festival, we conducted our social media audit for the month the festival is live, along with the consecutive month both before and after the specific event. The exact dates we audited are as follows:

● Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival - March 1-May 31, 2016 ● Lollapalooza - June 1-August 31, 2016 ● Sasquatch - March 1-June 30, 2016

We first selected Lollapalooza as a major competitor for its similarity to Coachella, along with its differences. Lollapalooza and Coachella are both music festivals that take place during similar time frames and contain similar artists and genres of music. Lollapalooza is an annual music festival that takes place in several cities and countries around the world including: Chicago, USA; Sao Paulo, Brazil; Berlin, Germany; Santiago, Chile; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. It has a smaller fan base 4

and attendance rate than Coachella does but is an international event, while Coachella is not. We determined Sasquatch was a valid competitor because it is a considerably smaller festival, but it has an extremely loyal fan base, similar to Coachella. It is held at the Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Wash., and usually falls on Memorial Day Weekend. In order to attend the festival, camping at the venue is a requirement, while Coachella gives the option to camp or stay elsewhere.

4 "Lollapalooza." Wikipedia . Wikimedia Foundation, n.d. Web. 1 Nov. 2016.

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Sasquatch was voted as one of the “Top 10 Summer Music Festivals” by ConcertBloom, whereas Coachella and Lollapalooza were not listed. 5

Our team manually counted all posts and interactions - comments, likes and shares - across the three chosen platforms. We calculated averages across all platforms and noted the number of followers for each channel. We compared each music festival’s posting content and how it was received by its followers. To determine what festival goers and followers were saying about Coachella, we used Social Mention, Google Trends and Ice Rocket. The keywords we used to search this information included: Coachella, Lollapalooza, Sasquatch, and music festival. Results Brand Consistency All of Coachella’s social media platforms remain consistent. The handle is the same across all platforms, it carries its brand out through the iconic avatar of structures from the festival and all bios contain its website URL. The brand maintained the same tone of voice throughout its various platforms which contained mostly short phrases and emoticons spread out sporadically. The personality that Coachella embodies throughout its social media is a cool, calm and collected. It limits its word count within posts, especially Instagram, and use emojis relevant to its phrases and images. Social Media Audit

5 "Top 10 Summer Music Festivals in the US". ConcertBoom . ConcertBoom. Retrieved 1 November 2016.

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Frequency of posts

This graph shows how many times each festival posted on the three provided social

media platforms during the time frame that we focused on (one month before festival, during the festival, and one month afterward).

Instagram

The Coachella Instagram has 951k followers and has posted 686 times in its existence. The majority of its posts are of artists performing, countdown to ticket sales, and aesthetically pleasing photos. The majority of the posts were in the weeks leading up to the festival and then during the two weeks of the actual event. After the event was over, the Coachella Instagram had limited activity. The posts dropped off immediately after the week of the festival.

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Coachella has a considerably larger follower base on Instagram than any of the other festivals. Coachella is between the other two regarding the amount of photos posted. Coachella has 686, Lollapalooza has 1,076, and Sasquatch has 284. Since Coachella is put on two weekends back-to-back, it opens up the opportunity for more attendance. It also has a high number of “reach” according to Social Mention. Reach is defined on Social Mention as a measure of range of influence and is found by the number of unique authors referencing your brand divided by the total number of mentions. Because Coachella has a higher opportunity for attendance and the highest reach, it attracts more followers than its competing festivals.

The photos that received the most positive attention were those that included photos sent in by fans or photos of headliner artists that were performing at the festival. Hashtags are almost never used and are rarely present in the comments either. Coachella likes to maintain a level of ambiguity, which is seen also in its very vague tweets and captions on Facebook and Instagram. To maintain this

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vagueness, it does not use hashtags. It also has such a high attendance rate that it may not feel the need to reach a wider audience. Ninety-nine posts out of the total 138 posts observed in this study were posted during the time of the festivals (both Weekend 1 and Weekend 2). This is about 71 percent of the Instagram content posted during the time period that was recorded. A consistent voice was maintained throughout all instagram posts. The captions are all very informal, short, and lowercase. Emoticons are used on occasion, and links to videos are used on few occasions.

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Similar to follower averages, Coachella dominates its competitors by over 75

percent. Twitter

Twitter (@Coachella) was the festival’s most frequently updated platform, especially during the festival, but not the platform with the most followers. With 790,000 followers and 2,863 tweets, a majority of the content comes from before and during the two weekend events. With 317 tweets throughout the three-month span that we studied, 201 of Coachella’s tweets were posted during the two three-day festivals in April. This is far more usage of the platform than Sasquatch employed, as it only had 104 tweets throughout its designated three-month time span, but is less than Lollapalooza, which had 448 tweets over the three months surrounding its event.

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These are typical tweets for Coachella during the time of the festival. A majority of the tweets throughout the three-month time span included simple photos of artists, performers, and vendors with short and clever captions, such as those above. Coachella’s voice on Twitter is short, to-the-point, and informative when it needs to be. Out of the 317 tweets, 184 included photos and gifs of this sort, and 19 included videos of performances. These tend to be the most engaging posts and the ones that received the most feedback and interaction from followers.The “Thank You” tweet above gained the most interaction of Coachella’s tweets to date.

The tweets that received the least engagement from followers were the informational concert updates like the one above. These included performance cancellations, separate events, weather updates, and more. Although posted 60

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times from Coachella, these types of tweets were seen far more from Lollapalooza, and hardly at all from Sasquatch. After the festival concluded, Coachella nearly abandoned its Twitter account, and remained only to tweet about ticket sales throughout the rest of the off-season.

Coachella has 790,000 followers, Sasquatch has 31,200 followers and Lollapalooza has 442,000 followers.

Twitter Averages

Coachella:

Average numbers of retweets: 302 Average number of favorites: 730

Sasquatch: Average number of retweets: 10 Average number of favorites: 25

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Lollapalooza Average number of retweets: 50

Average number of favorites: 110 Facebook

The Coachella Facebook page is the most followed social media platform that the music festival uses. A majority of the posts leading up to the festival are about corporate partnerships, or about artists and music videos. During the festival the majority of Coachella’s posts did not have much substance other than an aesthetic festival picture, the link to a Youtube video, or the link to the festival’s live stream. In the comment sections of Coachella’s posts, most of the conversation was from festival goers who were trying to buy or sell tickets to others. After the event was over, the Coachella Facebook page completely stopped posting content. The last day of the festival was April 24, and the organization did not post anything during the month of May. The weeks leading up to the festival and the days during the event were high traffic, but immediately stopped after the last festival day.

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This graph illustrates the number of followers each festival has on its Facebook platforms. As can be seen, Coachella surpasses the other two festivals by a lot, with over 13 times the amount of followers as Sasquatch. Lollapalooza lands just a few thousand followers under Coachella on Facebook.

The above graph illustrates the total number of “likes” each music festival has on its Facebook page, while the graph below shows the average number of likes, comments and shares per post for each festival.

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Facebook Engagement

Similar to Instagram and Twitter, Coachella has a much higher number of followers or “likes” on its page than its competitors. Coachella has an overwhelming 1,736,702 followers, while Lollapalooza has 1,030,235 and Sasquatch has 129,361.

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Every one of Coachella’s Facebook posts had some form of media. All of the festival’s posts over the three-month period that we examined included a photo, video, or link to an article or Youtube video. Coachella’s posts that included native videos were much more popular than posts that included links to videos on other sites, as seen above.

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This contest that was through a partnership on the Lollapalooza Facebook page was one of its most-liked posts. This was posted over a month before the event was to take place, and still received more interactions than posts during the time of the actual music festival. Contests for free festival tickets and amenities are extremely popular among followers and festival goers. Not all people who are interested in attending a music festival can afford it, so it keeps a good reputation to offer a chance to win a free ticket or opportunity to attend.

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Customer Interaction Example

These are great examples of good customer service from Lollapalooza Coachella on Facebook. It is important to utilize social media for customer service because it is an easier interaction than through a phone or email service. It is important to remember that social media is not only a site for followers to interact, but also a place where festival officials and employees can have a voice. Sasquatch did not

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execute customer service on Facebook as frequently as Coachella or Lollapalooza; this could be because the festival received fewer comments per post.

Some of the most frequently posted content on Sasquatch’s Facebook page was about the Sasquatch podcast. These posts included links and overviews about what was covered in the podcast, but received a considerably lower number of likes, comments and shares. Conversation Analysis Through the use of Google Trends and Social Mention, we were able to obtain information to better understand and visualize Coachella’s social media presence as well as its competitors. Social Mention allows people to view the “strength” of an organization, which is described as the likelihood that a brand is being discussed on social media. Coachella’s strength ranked at an 82 percent, compared to 72 percent for Sasquatch and Lollapalooza at 52 percent. These sources for Coachella came from Twitter, Photobucket, Reddit and Topix. Social Mention also gave us insight to the sentiment (ratio of positive to negative mentions) for Coachella and its

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competitors. Coachella came in with a 13 to 1 ratio, with 106 neutral comments in between. Sasquatch has a 16 to 1 ration with 14 neutral comments in between, and Lollapalooza has a 27 to 6, or reduced 5 to 1 ratio with 92 neutral mentions and interactions. Top hashtags found associated with Coachella are “Coachella”, “Bellathorne”, “Careerarc”, “hiring” and “panorama”. Top keywords, found from Social Mention, are “hella”, “real”, “queen” and “DIY outfits”. For Saquatch, top hashtags are “Sasquatch”, “Sasquatch festival” and “Sasquatch line-up” and the top keywords are “Portland”, “tour”, “people” and “music”. Lastly, Lollapalooza’s top keywords are “Lollapalooza”, “performers”, “Chicago” and “Muse”. It’s top hashtags are “mumshour”, “buylocal” and “unique”. After cross-referencing strictly Twitter via Social Mention, we found very different results for Coachella. According to Social Mention, Coachella has a 100 percent strength rate on Twitter. Coachella is tweeted about, on average, every one minute. The sentiment ranked at 3 to 1 and the reach came out at 192 percent. This means that high-profile accounts and unique authors reference our client in their tweets. Google Trends was helpful in viewing the time period and region that people were searching our client and competitors names. Prior to Coachella’s festival, an average of 6.8 people on a scale that maxes out at 100 were talking about Coachella. However, between April 10 and 23, an average of 71.5 people were discussing our client. After the festival, between April 24 and May 28, these averages decreased again to 9.8. Interests in region pertaining to Coachella are the United States, the Philippines, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In the graph below, we can see the sporadic changes in the conversation of Coachella.

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One of our competitors pale in comparison to Coachella when it comes to overall social media and internet conversation, and one surpasses it. Sasquatch was May 27-30. When looking at Google Trends and observing conversations about Sasquatch, we found that its average number of conversations the month prior to the festival was 4.4 on a scale that maxed out at 100. Days before and during the festival, the average number of people talking about Sasquatch was 12.5. The month after, these numbers were even lower at an average of 3.5. Lollapalooza was hosted in Chicago from July 28-31. In the month before Lollapalooza’s festival, an average of 15.25 were talking about it, which is higher than Coachella’s average of before-concert conversation. Lollapalooza also surpassed Coachella in average number of conversation during each events given festival dates. Coachella averages 71.5 conversation rate during its festival, whereas Lollapalooza averages 85 on a scale of 100 of people discussing it during the festival. These results are shown in the graph below. You can see Coachella in the blue peaking during the middle to end of April, but being surpassed by Lollapalooza throughout other times of the year.

Social Mention: Coachella’s strength = 82 percent Sasquatch strength = 72 percent Lollapalooza strength = 52 percent Ratio of Positive to Negative Mentions: Coachella came in with a 13 to 1 ratio, with 106 neutral comments in between Sasquatch has a 16 to 1 ration with 14 neutral comments in between

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Lollapalooza has a 27 to 6, or reduced 5 to 1 ratio with 92 neutral mentions and interactions Average number of people (on a scale up to 100) conversing about each festival during the given festivals dates: Coachella: 71.5 Sasquatch: 12.5 Lollapalooza: 85 Recommendations

1. The main issue we recorded with Coachella is the complete absence of a social media presence in its off-season. We recommend that Coachella keep up its social media throughout the year more consistently.

2. Coachella, across social media platforms, does not really utilize hashtags. We suggest that Coachella use a consistent hashtag across all channels so that content posted by Coachella as well as the festival’s fans is able to be found in one place. An example includes: #Coachella2016

3. We strongly suggest that Coachella engage in more interactions with its followers. We recommend that Coachella make its posts more interactive because interactive posts were the ones that received the most positive comments and likes. Additionally, engaging with its audience will build stronger brand loyalty, especially if Coachella uses social media to respond to complaints or problems from customers and fans.

4. More offseason posts on Instagram (e.g. featuring pictures from the prior year and repeated posts of the Coachella poster with its lineup).

5. Increased use of #hashtags on Instagram and Twitter to increase chances of coming up on related search inquiries.

6. Extended number of interactions on Twitter e.g. replying to and answering tweets regarding questions about Coachella, hyping up followers by replying to positive-based tweets and directing negatively-based tweets to message Coachella in an effort to rectify customer and follower issues.

7. "Pinning" on Twitter of the most recent and relevant tweet regarding pre-sale tickets, ticket sales and lineups.

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