Emoticon Thinking: FREE Ways to Promote Your High School Musical or School Play

Marketing, promoting and advertising a High School Musical or School Play used to involve printing off posters and putting them up around town. Word would get out and the town would show up.

Today, that's probably not enough. So how can you rouse the community to support the school and come out for the fine arts? The kids are probably way ahead of you. Facebook, myspace, twitter, email, texting - the kids are all on line. Time for you to be as well!

Facebook provides the ability to create an event invitation. You set it up with the time, information about the show and how to buy tickets. Get your cast members to forward the invitation to all their friends and so on.  Before you know it thousands of folks will have received notice that the show is coming up. Better yet, every person invited is now part of a mailing list that the event administrator can now use to send updates and reminders. You can also upload photos and links to newspaper articles about the show!  (Not FREE but useful are Facebook ads. You can pay by click and get a lot of exposure for little cash outlay.)

Twitter is worth trying, even though it requires a bit more effort than Facebook. Because folks can search based on location and other key words you can start to gain followers with tweets that include your city and high school. It's also worth adding the twitter account name to poster and other publicity. Twitter can be used to build excitement about the show with updates about rehearsals, costumes and other trivia. 

Email lists are always powerful. Ask other groups at the school to pass the word for you. If possible put up a simple website with ticket info for news and other sites to link to.

You may also want to experiment with tying in with local restaurants. Dinner and a show or a free desert with show ticket could be a way to get the restaurants to do more than just hang your poster in the window.

Finally, don't forget the traditional ways of getting the word out. Posters still work wonders. A photo in the local paper is fun and lets people know about you. Churches and other community groups will also usually hand out information about your show as well.