Thousands of messages filled @biennalejogja’s Instagram inbox. Hundreds answered as quickly as possible. Hundreds more, unfortunately, sunk unnoticed. Questions about visitor registration, opening hours, and other issues kept on coming.
Huhum Hambilly, the Coordinator of Public Communications Biennale Jogja XVI Equator #6 2021, spoke out. Instagram became his weapon to reach the public. Tiktok, YouTube, and Twitter were used strategically. After that, engagement becomes the target.
“We have the best pictures and the coolest narration. When it’s thrown into social media, the reality is in engagement,” said Huhum on the stage of the Jogja National Museum (JNM) at Open Source: Management Talks, Thursday (11/11) afternoon. According to him, public communication fails when engagement on social media content tends to be low or even nil.
Huhum sees the Biennale Jogja as a momentum for the public to celebrate art events, given the tense and frightening pandemic situation for the past two years. “Friends who want to visit the Biennale are like shoppers at Beringharjo,” said Huhum, trying to find an analogy while laughing.
The social media content is laid out well by the Public Communications team directed by Huhum. The people’s tendency to play social media until they lose track of time is why they are serious about working on the Biennale’s social media. “This trend is a crucial and strategic reason for using Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and Tiktok which are integrated with websites, programs, and ongoing activities,” he said.
Stories on Instagram, videos on YouTube, tweets on Twitter, to hashtags on Tiktok, are uploaded with great consideration. The key, according to Huhum, is the visual strategy. His team is familiar with the composition of the timeline for uploading content, the schedule for publication of programs and activities, in building the rhythm of social media publications.
His achievement, the hashtag #biennalejogja on Tiktok, reached 1.3 million viewers. The surge of visitors and the explosion of comments on social media then became data for the Public Communications team to develop language and visualization because changes in patterns took place very quickly.
Behind the busy social media of the Biennale Jogja, the quality of visitors needs to be considered. Therefore, apart from being a celebration, the Biennale Jogja, through the information available on social media, needs to be responded to by visitors as an insight. Social media publishing can be a science. The right public reach will attract quality visitors.
“Public outreach needs to be done properly to attract quality visitors. Those who are not just having fun are creating riots,” concluded Fairuzul Mumtaz, the moderator today, who directed the Management Discussion to the next speaker.
