Taylor Swift x Butcher Billy hard act to follow

The Taylor Swift x Butcher Billy exhibition in the Waverley Market secret stairs space

However with our Taylor Swift x Butcher Billy exhibition in the Waverley Market secret stairs space having opened last Saturday I decided it was time to embrace Instagram, where we post only occasionally, and sign up to TikTok.

Billy has 275,000 followers on Instagram and everything he does attracts attention, but when he posted some photos of the exhibition taken by Jack Arts/BuildHollywood who had done the installation and had 300 likes in the first couple of minutes I was still surprised.

However that still didn’t prepare me for yesterday when Billy shared a video on TikTok of the poster display in Hackney in London which I had had put up in advance of his visit and had already made it onto the platform and in no time at all there had been thousands of likes, shares and comments.

The poster display in Hackney received thousands of likes on TikTok

By Thursday evening there were over 3000 likes on Instagram and it had been shared with others almost 500 times. Meanwhile on TikTok there were almost 7000 likes, it had been shared over a thousand times and almost 600 people had added the video to their favourites.

I’m well aware this is not on the industrial scale influencers claim to operate but I was suitably impressed and checked in on Twitter to see if there had been any chatter. I was not disappointed. Somebody had posted pics of the Hackney posters the previous evening that Billy had retweeted and the tweet had been seen by 372,000 people, retweeted 1300 times and liked 16,000 times. If I’m honest it restored my faith in Twitter that it still has a part to play in reaching people.

Before London, Billy is in Manchester and I had posters put up there as well and that too then added to the comments on TikTok along with news of sightings in Glasgow which originally surprised me until I found out they had gone up early after not being due until next week.

What will be interesting is the reaction when the Edinburgh posters go up on Monday to coincide with Billy’s return. I’ve ordered three extra copies of the Correx boards on display in the exhibition and people will be able to win them by having their photograph taken either at the exhibition or in front of a street poster so Swifties looking to win should watch out for an announcement early next week.

The exhibition continues until early January and there is a second high profile poster campaign in Edinburgh for Christmas and the New Year on Princes Street and at Haymarket. There is an image for each of the tracks on the latest Taylor Swift album and we have prints, posters and cards for all of them. There are six different t-shirts with The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived and The Tortured Poets Department shirts currently proving the most popular.

We do have other exhibitions in the pipeline but the combination of Butcher Billy and Taylor Swift will be very hard to follow.