Sovereign Hill

The Objective

Sovereign Hill is a renowned open-air museum in Ballarat, Victoria in Australia, offering immersive gold mine tours that bring the 1850s Gold Rush era to life. As a registered charity and not-for-profit living museum, they evolve constantly and create new features to connect new generations with the past, through multiple exhibitions such as the Australian Centre for Rare Arts & Forgotten Trades and the Australian Centre for Gold Rush Collections. With vibrant stories and a rich history to share with locals and tourists, they decided to target younger audiences and inspire future generations by connecting with them on TikTok. Besides posting updates about ongoing events, they wanted share their stories through videos that were both creative and engaging to not only boost awareness but also grow their online community.

The Solution

To better engage with audiences on TikTok, Sovereign Hill leveraged features such as Trending Sounds, Hashtags and Auto-captions to increase viewership and engagement on their video posts. As an entertainment platform, TikTok allows users, creators and musicians to upload wide varieties of sounds, which has the potential to be used in millions of videos posted on the platform. Trending sounds, which can range from a verse in a popular song to a sound snippet or iconic dialogues, can be used by brands to increase the entertainment value of their content and create buzz. In addition, Sovereign Hill also used hashtags in their captions to boost content visibility and better categorise their content. Users who are interested or searching for content related to museums, history or destinations in Ballarat would be able to discover them more easily. 

To make their content more accessible, Sovereign Hill also adds auto-captions, which are subtitles that are automatically transcribed and added to videos while being edited in the TikTok app. This allows users to  still enjoy the content with full context in circumstances where they are not able to listen to audio.

By combining the use of these creative tools and features in video production with video analytics in the backend, Sovereign Hill was able to optimise their content strategy to improve audience engagement.

The Result

After experimenting with various video styles and analysing content performance, Sovereign Hill saw an uplift in engagement on a video featuring the behind-the-scenes of their raspberry drops manufacturing process. This led them to expand the video idea into a series, as they showcased different parts of the candy making process and started to feature other products they make in-house. Gradually, they saw their online community grow, recording a 26K increase in followers through their video series. Their most-viewed video has now been viewed over 2.7M times, adding on to more than 438K video likes received across all videos. Moving into the future, they hope to grow their community by collaborating with creators on TikTok, continuing to tell their stories in a fun, creative and dynamic way.