Most Portuguese theatres are on social media. They have profiles on Instagram, Facebook, some on LinkedIn. They post regularly. And in most cases, they do exactly what they shouldn’t: they use social media as a notice board.
The pattern is always the same. Show poster. Date and time. Link to box office. Repeated as many times as there are titles in the programme. With luck, a production photograph. With even more luck, a quote from the director pulled from the press kit.
It’s not that this content is wrong. It’s that it serves almost no purpose.
Social media is not an information distribution channel. It is a space of contested attention, where what works is what builds relationship, not what informs. The distinction sounds simple, but it has profound consequences for how content is conceived.
To inform is to say: “On the 15th, at 9pm, X opens at Theatre Y. Tickets here.” To build relationship is to say something about the world, about the work, about the people who make it, in a way that makes someone feel there is something there that concerns them.
Theatres consistently confuse the two. And the result is a digital presence that exists but does not communicate.
The problem is not a lack of resources, though that is the most commonly used justification. It is a lack of perspective on what social media actually is and who is being addressed. A theatre that posts for “the general public” is posting for no one. Social media rewards specificity, a recognisable voice, a consistent point of view, a reason for someone to come back.
Some organisations have understood this. They are the ones that show behind the scenes not as curiosity but as argument: “look at what is happening here and why it is worth your attention.” The ones that let artists speak in the first person, imperfections included. The ones that treat a premiere not as a product to be sold but as an event to be shared.
The difference between the two approaches is not budget. It is the decision to treat the audience as interlocutor rather than recipient.
There is something else theatres rarely do and that costs nothing: reply. When someone comments, shares, asks a question, the typical institutional response is silence or an emoji. Social media is, at its origin, bidirectional. An organisation that only broadcasts will never build community, however good the content it produces.
What theatres still haven’t understood is that social media does not exist to sell tickets. It exists to create the conditions in which people want to buy tickets, because they feel a connection to the work, to the artists, to the space. That distinction changes everything: the type of content, the frequency, the tone, the way success is measured.
Posting a poster is not having a digital strategy. It is postponing one.
Photo: © Julian | Unsplash
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