Cultural Content with guest Beks Leary
Catching up with National Theatre's Social Media & Content Manager
Morning ☀️,
Today we’ve got a Q&A with Beks Leary from National Theatre.
In her role at National Theatre she’s:
built a following of 100k on TikTok from the ground up in 6 months (the following currently sits at 169K and around 4.5M likes)
spearheaded the brilliant ‘Life in Stages’ YouTube series (32 million impressions and counting)
been consistently top of her game across it all
So it was pretty darn lovely to get some of her time for this…
Role: Social Media and Content Manager
Age: 29
Where can we find you online? On Twitter and LinkedIn
As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
An artist. I haven't practiced now in well over a decade so that ship has definitely sailed.
Could you give us a whistle stop tour of your career to date?
I started out in digital marketing roles for Salisbury International Arts Festival, the National Centre for Circus Arts and the Bush Theatre where I got stuck in learning all the tricks of the trade.
My first distinct social media role was at the BBC, where I lead campaigns for flagship BBC One programmes. This included:
engaging fandoms on Line of Duty Series 5 (24.9m video views)
setting up and running the biggest BBC Facebook Group
winning two Lovie Awards
Gentleman Jack… where the fans made fan art of me and sent it to me as a gift on a mug)!
leading socials for David Attenborough's Dynasties, the Christmas brand campaign, World on Fire and Dracula – amongst many others
being 1/4 of the team managing the BBC One pages, which were the most engaged with after BBC News at the BBC
I'm now leading the social and content strategies for the National Theatre across an audience of 2.4m – grown from 1.1m in 2.5 years.
Proudest moment of your career?
Winning two Lovie awards by public and judges vote for my Line of Duty campaign at the BBC - beating ITV 2's Love Island.
What project/idea has got you really immersed/excited at work recently?
I'm loving developing the National Theatre's TikTok channel. It's full of chaos, fun and theatre love. We're not being precious about it, but trying things out and seeing how they work. It's taken real understanding of our archive of work - especially the shows on our streaming platform National Theatre at Home. Some things have flown, some things have bombed. But we're really meeting audiences where they're at and engaging huge numbers of 16-24 year olds with our brand.
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I've recently started working with an agency called Don't Buy Media for some of our content who are bringing fresh ideas to the table and amazing knowledge of the trends. And maybe I'll get in front of the camera a bit more again in the coming months.
If you had a £10k grant to spend within your department as your pleased, what would you spend it on?
A TikTok/Reels freelancer or agency.
A tweet/blog/book/practitioner that made you think / changed your professional views
The whole BBC content team really shifted my understanding of social media management. When you're engaging millions and millions of people a week you really get to see how intricate changes in content make an impact.
My key learnings about making content were:
Find what's relatable (give people a reason to share)
Find what's entertaining (define the emotion you want audiences to feel)
Be funny whenever you can (if it's appropriate)
Be lead by how users act on each platform (in keeping with your brand):
The main learning on a platform management side of things was how much you need to feed the Facebook algorithm. We were posting 12 times a day, every day. Just on Facebook.
You can't expect to get organic reach on the platform without a huge back catalogue of evergreen content to feed the hungry algorithm. And you need variety of post types, though the majority should be video. Arts organisations as a general rule make way too much time-specific content.
What advice would you give to graduates starting out in the sector hoping to follow a similar career path?
If you can't get a foot in the door of your dream sector, start out in one adjacent to it and start side stepping!