Case Study: Growing the 5th Seattle Urban Book Expo's Social Reach Before Doors Opened

3 days ago

2 min read

Three weeks of focused social media work ahead of the 5th Seattle Urban Book Expo added roughly 1,300 Instagram followers and grew total post engagement by over 100%, with zero paid ad spend behind it.

A stack of notebooks and books, representing the literary community the Seattle Urban Book Expo celebrates

The Client

The Seattle Urban Book Expo (SUBE) is an annual event founded by author Jeffrey Cheatham to celebrate and build community around BIPOC authors, publishers, and readers in Seattle. By its fifth year in August 2022, SUBE had grown into a multi-day event anchored by a main expo day at El Centro de la Raza, with author readings, a youth activity zone, and dozens of community sponsors and partners.

The Engagement

King's Dream ran SUBE's social media marketing in the weeks leading into the 5th Expo (held August 14, 2022), posting across Facebook and Instagram to build pre-event awareness, spotlight the authors who would be reading, and thank the sponsors and partners who made the event possible.

What We Posted

The content mix was built around three things that actually move a community event: individual author spotlights (introducing readers like Robert Liu-Trujillo, Josias Jean Pierre, and Jillian "Jilleybean," each with their own bio and why they mattered to the event), logistics and family-friendly programming (face painting, the Sip & Chat panel, and festival street activities run with the City of Seattle and Beacon Business Alliance), and sponsor and partner recognition posts that gave visible credit to the organizations backing the event.

What Moved

Comparing the three-week run-up (July 25 – August 15, 2022) to a June 2022 baseline month, the numbers were clear:

Instagram followers grew by roughly 1,300, across 21 posts published in the window
Facebook fans grew by 36, across 16 posts published
Facebook page engagement rose from 38 to 44 total engagements (reactions, shares, and comments)
Page content clicks rose from 31 to 94 — more than a 3x increase
Total post engagement across the account rose from 547 to 660, an increase of 113 engagements
Photo posts alone drove 375 engagements, up from 293 in the baseline period, and the Reel format added 188 more

The single highest-performing Instagram post of the campaign was the event's "Prologue" kickoff announcement, which pulled 67 likes and 6 comments — more than double the next-best post — showing that a clear, well-timed "this weekend is happening" post outperformed even the individual author spotlights.

Why It Worked

None of this came from paid promotion. It came from a steady, almost daily posting cadence in the final three weeks, content that named real people and real partners instead of generic event hype, and posts timed to the specific moments — two hours before doors, the morning of, the day after — when a community audience is actually paying attention.