Leveraging Facebook and Instagram to increase brand awareness: Case Ship Festival

This thesis aimed to investigate theory, strategies, and methods connected to event marketing and social media, mainly focusing on Facebook and Instagram. The goal was to perform a thorough examination on how the platforms could be leveraged into a business setting to increase brand awareness for events as the ones of the commissioner, Ship Festival. Brand awareness and advertising concepts within social media for events, were discussed in the theoretical framework of the thesis. It described awareness and communication theories directly connected to platforms such as Facebook. The differences between paid and organic content were also described and additionaly including the tools that can collect, analyse and use data from that media. This way businesses and events such as Ship can scale in a faster and more analytical way by raising awareness. For the empirical part of the study, a quantitative research method was implemented. To collect data, a questionnaire was created and sent to students at the South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, XAMK. The goal was to gather insights about the Ship Festival and their online status. The information was analysed and used to provide recommendations on how to improve their online presence. Another section in the empirical part of the thesis included hands on experience and examples from an internship completed in Finland at the Ship Festival 2020. The examples included the entire creation process of advertising campaigns on Facebook and the results