From Una Voce, June 2025, Issues in Focus: Audience Engagement; Social media in Vancouver and a podcast in Calgary.

We had many developments this season with our social media committee here at the VSO. Composed of new committee members Aidan Wong, Joo Bin Yi, and Manuel Lok, we doubled our social media following via Instagram since last fall. We started off by posting small outings and gatherings that our musicians attended, as well as chamber concerts or off-site performances in which our musicians performed. We continued with musician’s spotlight posts which are gradually growing in popularity. These spotlights include photos of our musicians in the wild doing the things they love, as well as questions regarding their personal and professional lives. We find that audiences like these spotlights as they add a personal touch to the faces they see on stage while also giving a look into how they got to do what they do in the orchestra today. 

A newer series that we began this year was our rapid fire questions, in the form of reels. These have been our most popular posts so far, with our reel of principal second violinist Sam Milner reaching over 18,000 views! We find that these interview-style videos are a fun way for our musicians to share about themselves and let their personalities come through at the same time. We also made tenure related posts and stories, highlighting newly tenured players. These posts have done well, particularly due to frequent sharing by friends and family.

While on our recent Eastern Canada tour, we kept our audience updated with our travels, our backstage life, and touristic activities. Following the tour, a new series we started was a Q&A widget we posted to our story, where our followers could ask us anything they wanted. This Q&A received an overwhelming amount of response; so much so that we were unable to answer all of the questions. We made an effort to balance questions of differing content and context, drawing on our backgrounds of playing different instruments, going to different schools, and coming from different cities.

We are hoping to continue the growth of our social media presence in the music community, and also the community of Vancouver. We continue to make reels and posts that we believe will be popular to the general public, and we are lucky that our orchestra has been open and willing to participate in our posts.