For those who love ballet, it must have been like nailing 32 fouettés, Swan Lake style.

When Moscow's famous Bolshoi Theater opened its doors to a group of Instagram users on Monday night, social media marketing and a love of all things ballet combined to produce some impressive photos.

Tagging their pictures #EmptyBolshoi, the participants, picked for their large following on the photography social media service, got to freely roam the halls of Moscow's centuries-old dance venue.

Guests included major Russian social media names like Anna Pavlova, Nasya Kopteva and Natalia Sazonova, whose joint number of Instagram followers comes just short of 100,000.

Founded during the reign of Catherine the Great, the Bolshoi Theater has become a symbol of Russian cultural excellence far beyond the country’s borders. Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" was first performed here, and many of the Bolshoi's dancers have been fêted by audiences around the world.

Current big names dancing at the Bolshoi include ballerinas Svetlana Zakharova, Evgenia Obraztsova, Ekaterina Shipulina and Maria Alexandrova, as well as male dancers David Hallberg and Semyon Chudin.

These days, the building's lavish interior is also a big part of its attraction. One of the top features is the theater's grand chandelier, whose 300 oil lamps have been replaced with electric light bulbs.

Getting into the Bolshoi is not an easy thing to accomplish for ballet lovers. Tickets for performances usually go on sale several months before opening night, and sell out quickly for prices that can reach 8,000 rubles ($193) or more.

Even the hour-long guided tour will set you back 1,300 rubles ($31) — and that's after an hour or so of waiting in line outside, whatever the weather, hoping to be among the 15 to 20 people allowed on a tour.

The #EmptyBolshoi campaign is modeled on similar projects by which other cultural institutions have tried to boost their social media following.

This summer, the #emptymet photography project had participants looking behind the scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. London's Royal Opera House held a similar event just a few weeks before the Bolshoi.

As far as the Bolshoi's social media efforts go, there is still room for improvement.

While the Bolshoi Ballet Academy has accumulated a Facebook following of over 300,000 people, the theater's own Facebook page is not even a tenth of that size, occasionally struggling with English-language posts and odd formatting.

And the BolshoiOfficial Twitter account, launched in May, has yet to start engaging its users rather than merely tweeting at them.

On the morning after the #emptybolshoi event, the @bolshoi_theatre Instagram account was about to reach 6,000 followers — showing some growth, but still quite far from being in the same league as some of last night's visitors.