The Roxy Theatre’s Social Media Transformation

West Hollywood’s Roxy Theatre has a storied past, playing host to numerous musical legends like Nirvana and Bob Marley and serving as a hangout for the Johns…Lennon and Belushi when they were in town. But it had fallen a notch or two and its owner Nic Adler was looking for a way to remake the glory and the fans’ excitement.

Enter social media. The venue has built up more than 26,000 followers, making it the most popular club on Twitter. It uses Twitter to reward loyal bands, improve customer service and build up buzz among bands, who want to play there to take advantage of the reach it has on Twitter and Facebook.

Some of its creative uses of Twitter include “A Tweet Crawl” event that found a group of businesses on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard creating an all-night party with free access to clubs, drink specials and giveaways tweeted periodically.

It also created, Club Rox, an offering of 100 unlimited annual passes to the club for just $100. The offering, advertised only on Twitter, sold out in three days. But besides creating a new group of regular customers and improving the bottom line, the deal created an avid group of fans who tweet about the Roxy constantly and thus bring in more customers.

Adler isn’t ignoring Facebook either. He loves the way he can target small groups of people rather than blasting ads out to hundreds of thousands, where it will mostly be ignored as irrelevant.

Barb Dybwad has a long takeout in Mashable.