tfc_blog

by Sheri Candler

Every year, I compile a presentation for the TFC all-staff meeting to inform the group on what the latest social media trends are, what changes have recently taken place and what may be to come on the major social media platforms. This post will share the insights I gathered with that might benefit filmmakers in the coming year.

General Social Media Trends
  • People’s attention spans are short and the way they like to consume content has also changed. Content formats like Stories have become popular. They are short, engaging, and addictive in a way that people can spend hours scrolling through one Story after another. Facebook forecasts that sharing to Stories will surpass sharing to Feeds at some point in the coming year. Consider creating a 15 seconds vertical video as one of your trailers.
  • 1 out of every 4 Facebook Pages now use paid advertising as part of their social media strategy and Facebook accounts for 23% of total U.S. digital ad spending. If you’re trying to grow an audience via Facebook and Instagram, budget will be needed for paid social media placement.
  • 4 in 10 consumers say they are unlikely to become emotionally attached to a brand unless they are interacting via social media, but those interactions need to be authentic and personalized. This means refrain from only posting about your projects and really try to relate, on a personal level, to your audience.
  • Most popular mobile social networking apps in the United States as of September 2019, by monthly users (in millions). Facebook is still tops when it comes to users.Statistic: Most popular mobile social networking apps in the United States as of September 2019, by monthly users (in millions) | Statista
  • Approximately 223 million Americans use social media in 2019. This is a slight increase over 2018, and a slight decrease compared to 2017. Overall, however, social media usage is essentially unchanged over the past four years. The ONLY social network growing among young Americans is Instagram, up from 64% to 66% in the past two years. Social networks in 2019 are now nearly as likely to be utilized by people 35-54 years old, than those younger, which is good news for theatrical campaigns and documentary makers.
    social_media_usage
    Social Media Usage: Total U.S. Population, from 2008 to 2019

Facebook
  • Facebook is actually less popular now than it was four years ago. But it is still at the top of the list for daily users.
    The only demographic group that is using Facebook more than in prior years are Americans 55+.
  • The average monthly change in page likes is just 0.13% Building your Facebook audience is definitely a slow and steady game.
    The average organic reach for a Facebook post is 5.5%. Take the number of fans on your page and multiply it by 5.5% to see if you are reaching the average per post. If you are not, then re-evaluate what you are posting.
  • 60% of Americans who watch digital video do so on Facebook and the average engagement rate for Facebook video posts is 6.13%
    Among U.S. adults who use Facebook, around three-quarters (74%) visit the site at least once a day.
  • Sources: https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research/social-media-usage-statistics
    https://blog.hootsuite.com/facebook-statistics/#business https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/16/facts-about-americans-and-facebook

    Recent changes that affect Facebook Pages
    • Facebook has eliminated Post Scheduling for pages on DESKTOP. To access this function, you need to use Creators Studio or third-party scheduling tools like Hootsuite.
    • Groups are booming on Facebook. They’re pretty much the platform’s most popular feature, and engagement in groups is skyrocketing.
    • A change in Reach calculations. More on that here.
    • New Creators Studio insights called Traffic Source. More on that here .

    Twitter
    • Twitter’s U.S. user base is predicted to grow 0.3% in 2020.
    • Only 20% of Twitter’s daily users are American.
    • Compared to other age groups, Gen Z is most likely to be using Twitter. (By comparison, only 26% of 30- to 49-year-olds use Twitter.) That said, Gen Z is still much more likely to be using YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook. 65% of Twitter’s top 10% of users (by tweet volume) identify as women. And 69% of this group say they tweet about politics, and identify as Democrats.
    • Tweets with hashtags get 100% more engagement, but only 1 or 2 hashtags.
    • 93% of video views on Twitter happen on mobile so be sure to use mobile-optimized video that has subtitles or captions for sound-off viewing.

    Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/twitter-statistics

    Recent changes that affect Twitter
    • No political advertising. Political ads are defined as content that references a candidate, political party, elected or appointed government official, election, referendum, ballot measure, legislation, regulation, directive, or judicial outcome. Ads that contain references to political content, including appeals for votes, solicitations of financial support, and advocacy for or against any of the above-listed types of political content, are prohibited under this policy.
    • Redesign of the Twitter layout on desktop happened in summer 2019.
    • Twitter lets you add a photo, video or gif to a Retweet. Read more about this here.
    • 2 rumored changes that could be coming in 2020. The ability to prevent other users from mentioning you without your permission and ability to disable a retweet on your tweet.

    Instagram.
    • 1 billion people use Instagram every month, though only 110 million are located in the United States.
    • Instagram is the most popular traditional social network among U.S. teens 13-17yrs. Only YouTube is more popular with teens. 72% of U.S. teens say they use Instagram, compared to 69% for Snapchat and 51% for Facebook.
    • The gender mix on Instagram is pretty even: 52% female and 48% male.
    • In case you were thinking of hiring an influencer to help with an Instagram campaign, brands pay Instagram influencers between $100 and $2,085 per post. For videos, they pay between $114 and $3,138, and for Stories they pay between $43 and $721.
    • Brands post an average of 2.5 Stories per week.

    Source: https://blog.hootsuite.com/instagram-statistics

    Recent changes that affect Instagram
    • Instagram is now hiding Likes on mobile devices for US accounts after testing in several other countries. Facebook may soon start hiding likes, too. Likes can still be seen on desktop.
    • Donation stickers available on IG. Instagram launched donation stickers for Stories back in May, giving accounts the capacity to raise money for non-profit groups via the option. A non profit must be registered on Facebook first in order to have this capability.
    • IGTV now supports Landscape Videos, though it is up to the user to actually turn the phone to watch them. Most people watch their IG feed in vertical position so uploading a landscape video is asking to go against consumer habits.
    • It is recommended to use Facebook Creators Studio on desktop to manage a brand Instagram account because it gives access to scheduling posts and expanded metrics.

    Source: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/facebook-expands-access-to-brand-collabs-manager-adds-new-insights-to-crea/566765

    A word about TikTok

    For those who do not have teenagers in your life, TikTok is a video sharing platform where short updates, typically accompanied by music, are shared publicly. This is one of the fastest-growing social platforms and forecasted to continue to grow by leaps and bounds in 2020, but be cautious with any platform championed by teens. The very young are quite fickle and meteoric rise is frequently countered with equally quick crashes as the party moves to the next shiny thing. For a look at brands killing it on TikTok, read more here.

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February 21st, 2020

Posted In: Facebook, Instagram, Marketing, Social Network Marketing, technology, Twitter

Tags: , , , ,


twitter

In the previous two posts, I wrote about changes I think most independent filmmakers should be aware of when it comes to using Facebook and Instagram for their marketing efforts. This post will talk about Twitter. Is having an account here still necessary?

Twitter

With 69 million monthly active users in the United States, 267 million worldwide, Twitter is one of the top social media sites that brands still actively use. We can’t go a day without hearing news of a certain someone ranting on the platform, and without a doubt, Twitter is the number one social media platform for breaking news. But is that helpful for the average indie filmmaker?

While it isn’t likely that filmmakers will post breaking news that is of interest to a broader public, one great reason to use Twitter is for video sharing. Over the last 12 months, tweets containing videos perform the best in terms of reach compared to posts with links, images, and GIFs. Filmmakers need to be able to produce a regular supply of short videos, ideally less than 1 minute long (Twitter mainly allows for videos of 2 minutes 20 seconds in total), with the first 3 seconds serving to capture thumb-stopping attention (thumb-stopping-causing someone on a mobile device to pause scrolling through their newsfeed). Give some thought to the kind of clips and trailers you will post to social versus what you would make for a theatrical experience (where the audience won’t be scrolling on their phones). Also, don’t forget to make these videos square (600 by 600 pixels) or vertical (600 by 750 pixels), instead of horizontal, to optimize for mobile viewing.

In 2018, Twitter has been grappling with slow user growth and has deleted thousands of fake and bott accounts, lowering follower numbers on most accounts. If you have seen a slight drop in followers, likely you had a few of these accounts following you.

A recent update to the Facebook Platform Policies ended the ability to automatically post Tweets to your Facebook profile or page. This was never a good idea as audiences on the two platforms are different and it was a lazy way of marketing. But for those who did connect their Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, a more manual process is now needed for posting to the different platforms.

As of September, Twitter has re-enabled the ability to see tweets in purely chronological order, if you change your settings. Two years after phasing out this ability in favor of top-ranked or “curated” tweets, Twitter gave back the functionality that most people loved about the platform. But you have to make a change in your settings, by unchecking the box that says Show the Best Tweets First. In a world where it seems your newsfeed is programmed by an algorithmic guess, finally having the ability to see news according to the time it was posted is refreshing.

Like Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has instituted its own political content policy on advertising. The platform considers ads that advocate for legislative issues of national importance to be governed by their new policy and in order to advertise, advertisers must go through Twitter’s certification process (https://business.twitter.com/en/help/ads-policies/restricted-content-policies/political-campaigning/US-political-content/how-to-get-certified-issue-ads.html). Most likely, if you are making a documentary with an issue of national significance at its core, such as abortion, civil rights, climate change, guns, healthcare, immigration, national security, social security, taxes, and trade, you will need to register your account in order to use Twitter advertising in the future.

Getting back to the question of whether indie filmmakers still should be using Twitter, it all depends on your ability to handle multiple social media accounts and what you want each account to do as far as your goals. If connecting with Twitter influencers, or perpetuating a campaign hashtag, or reaching a global audience outside of the U.S. are some of your main objectives, Twitter is still a great place to do that.

December 31st, 2018

Posted In: Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Twitter

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Updated January 25, 2018 to take into consideration changes announced for Facebook and Instagram. 

As 2017 winds to a close, I wanted to take some time to evaluate what I’ve learned in the social media space this year, both in my work with independent filmmakers and working for public media.

Between those two endeavors, I have helped to create, test and connect audiences to over 350 short videos made specifically for social media. The vast majority of those were less than one minute in length, included captions burned into each video, and used a paid social approach to ensure that the videos were seen by a highly targeted audience who would be most likely to share them.

Here are the main things I want to share with you as you contemplate your use of social media in 2018:

    • Cardinal rule on social: The content you post must be interesting and relevant to motivate a reaction from the viewer. Boring links, boring videos, boring images, boring calls to action that clearly only benefit you WILL BE IGNORED [and will be demoted in the newsfeed by Facebook algorithm]. The organic videos that performed the best for me were a story in themselves. They weren’t trailers, they weren’t promo videos, they didn’t often include a call to action on the video, and they weren’t random behind the scenes footage. The stories took one main idea and presented it first, then explained the idea, then sometimes ended with a question to encourage people to comment. The more shares and comments the videos received, the more views it got.  But why am I mainly talking about videos? Because…
    • By 2021, 82% of global internet traffic will be attributed to video. As more and more newsfeeds are filled with short video content, your account will need to compete. You’re a filmmaker so generating quality video content should be easy for you. But remember, 90% of the videos people see in their feeds are watched with the sound off. Better to make a video that is not audio driven, but rather driven by images that can tell a story on its own. Also, it is best to present these videos in a square format, rather than in a horizontal rectangle. As most people now access social media platforms via their mobile devices, a square video (1:1) fills the screen and gives a much richer experience. Widescreen videos are crunched and make captions difficult to read. See good examples here and here.

  • Facebook Live, Instagram Live, Live Story for Snapchat, Periscope for Twitter, Youtube Live. Live or near live experiences will continue to proliferate on social. Some of this may be ephemeral content, that lives for only 24 hours. If you have an exciting event happening or you have access to a person with a large following, you should be utilizing live sessions on social media. Facebook, in particular, will be highlighting videos that receive lengthy interaction in the comment section. If you want to see a comparison between Youtube Live and Facebook Live, CLICK HERE.
  • Influencer marketing is a thing, but it isn’t free. It is awesome to think that if you tag a celebrity, they will share your tweet, but the real impact comes from those who have an engaged following instead of a vague, large number. Look toward influencers that have a niche following and are more willing to get excited about your project than a tweet from a celeb who has little connection to your project. Another idea could be to utilize influencers as social media content creators for your project. Rather than hoping to access their network, perhaps you can pay them to create for yours. Be advised, the Federal Trade Commission is now cracking down on sponsored posts that do not publicly disclose a paid sponsorship arrangement. It is better to work with companies that specialize in bringing influencers and brands together, like MediaKix  Mostly Sunny  and Heartbeat as they are usually up to date on the regulations and how to negotiate deals. For an idea on pricing for working with influencers, see this Digiday report.
  • Facebook organic posting is nearly dead. If you are still posting links, photos and videos that do not regularly receive multiple comments, you can stop. The company has just announced that it will stop showing posts by brands and publishers if those posts are not inspiring conversation (comments) as their new focus is on bringing people together, not pushing traffic and views. Facebook is not interested in sending traffic to other websites or providing a passive viewing experience (such as video views with no comments). This change will really hit pages that have not been inspiring conversation in their comment sections. However, don’t ask for comments in your posts. Engagement bait will be demoted in the newsfeed. This change will not affect paid promotion.
  • Which means that you MUST invest in social advertising. Yes, you could boosts your organic posts, but you really should be set up on Facebook Business Manager and running campaigns through Ad Manager. You need a monthly budget to spend. Anyone who has tried to build up a following or reach their following on social will know the time of reliable, free, organic reach has passed, and it isn’t going to return since social media platforms have shareholders who want to see revenue. The good news is this allows for smarter advertising spend for a trackable return than publicity or more traditional methods of advertising (posters, postcards, flyers, TV/radio/outdoor/print). While a marketing mix is important and if you can spend to hire a publicist for earned media, and place media buys in as many outlets as possible, then by all means do it. But try tracking that write up in the New York Times or Variety to any kind of monetary return outside of an ego boost or calls from your friends to say they saw it. It is nearly impossible unless you run a survey at the theater or on a digital VOD service to prove that your publicity spend or traditional advertising spend resulted in any measurable return. There is so much proof of awareness and actual revenue tied to a digital advertising effort, even over the number of Likes/Retweets/Favorites and “Impressions.” Added bonus for Facebook advertising, you can create Custom Audiences to keep remarketing to those who have shown an interest in your posts rather than spending to hit the disinterested. You’ll just need to install the Facebook pixel on your website, store, Eventbrite etc in order to track properly and accumulate that audience for later targeting. Also, if you are going to be setting a monthly budget, you need to be setting monthly goals for growth. How do you know if what you are doing is working if you don’t measure against a goal? I wrote a piece on tracking social media earlier this year.
  • Twitter growth is the slowest of all the major social media platforms. If you are building up a big following on Twitter, you may want to quickly branch out. Twitter is great for breaking news stories, but rather sucks for self promotional tweets.
  • Instagram is also making changes, but they have been a little less forthcoming in this news. If you are using Instagram for business, such as having an account related to your film, you should make sure that it is set up as a business account, not a personal account. Just as years ago, Facebook stopped supporting personal profiles that were being used for business, Instagram is starting to do the same. Besides, it is great to access analytics that are offered on business accounts, so go ahead and set your account up like that or convert. Also, you should be taking advantage of Instagram Stories, rather than just posting photos and videos. Stories can now be archived on your account so they won’t disappear after 24 hours, as long as you choose to feature them on your account. For instructions, go HERE. One last bit of advice, start following hashtags that are relevant to your project. Accounts now have the ability to follow a hashtag, not just other accounts. See more on that HERE.
  • This year, Facebook introduced Watch and rumor has it that they will start prioritizing shows rather than only short content in their newsfeed. With this knowledge (and the vast audience that Facebook reaches), have you considered turning that feature script into a series instead? A series of content with an ongoing narrative between episodes provides many benefits: increased audience retention, strict production schedule and time management, sponsorship opportunities, and being able to create a loyal community over the long run instead of starting over with each new project. Social media is a great place to ensure distribution of said series. It is also a low cost place to test out plots, characters, flow, audience reactions etc. without having to gather heavy investment for a feature that is untested and has no clear path distribution.

For everyone here at The Film Collaborative, I wish you a happy, creative, industrious, and prosperous new year. Look for members of The Film Collaborative at Sundance 2018 and at many other film festivals and events in the coming year.

December 17th, 2017

Posted In: Facebook, Social Network Marketing, Uncategorized

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Today’s guest post is from TFC member John Chi whose microbudget film Tentacle 8 was recently released by Grand Entertainment Group. We thank John for sharing his experience with TFC and the knowledge he gained during the distribution phase of his film so that all independent filmmakers might benefit.

Changing The Paradigm

The first thing every filmmaker should ask themselves before considering to make an independent feature film is: how badly do I want to do this?  Are you prepared to do everything it takes, and make the necessary personal and professional sacrifices to ensure your film gets made and seen by an audience?  Often times, filmmakers think the answer is yes, when in fact it’s something less clear.

You can make it easier on yourself by writing a script that’s marketable, fits the sweet spot of what other people think you should be doing, saying, feeling, and thinking.  Then Google “how to win major awards at Sundance, SXSW, Toronto, Cannes and start a bidding war” and click, “I’m feeling lucky.”   That’s definitely a path many people take.

But like most independent filmmakers, who aren’t answering to studios or huge investors, it’s against our nature to do what other people tell us to do, especially when it comes to what’s popular or in vogue.  We’ll be the one that breaks the mold; we’ll be the one that changes the paradigm.  That’s exactly what we said as we assembled our team for TENTACLE 8.  We would be the one film that would change the paradigm of what’s possible.  We were going to make a global espionage movie about the NSA, shoot it in 15 days, and do it within the Ultra-Low Budget SAG agreement.  While many saw disaster, we saw opportunity.  It was our chance to stand out from the crowd, and do something either truly brave or astoundingly idiotic.

Just Get Through Production

John Chi Tentacle *

Director John Chi on the set of Tentacle 8

I was determined to make TENTACLE 8, a film that addressed social and political issues that wasn’t being addressed anywhere else.  At least not in narrative features.  My job was to assemble a team of filmmakers that shared my ambition, my optimism, and my foolishness to attempt what appeared on paper to be an impossible task.  If we kept saying that we were going to be the one, and preached it often enough, it would become true.  We would be the film that would change the paradigm of what independent films were capable of.

For most first time feature filmmakers, like I was, I thought Production would be the most difficult part of the journey.  It’s what most filmmakers are pretty good at, and best prepared to do.  I won’t describe at length what it took to get TENTACLE 8 made.  Instead, I’ll just say that it took an incredible amount of ingenuity, effort, and hard work to pull off what we did.  It was an extraordinary synergy of trust, belief, attention to detail, and commitment that made it all possible.  There were many selfless acts of kindness from people who didn’t have any reason to help us, but did anyway.  They were our angels.  Without them, we wouldn’t have finished the movie on our budget.  You can’t plan on those things happening, you just need to make sure you treat other people with respect, be humble, and always act professionally.  Don’t make it easy for other people to turn you away when you ask for help.  You might get lucky.

Making a movie is a labor of love under extremely stressful conditions, which tends to bond people.  By the end of production, we believed that we had accomplished something very special together.  We had done it.  We were on our way to realizing our mantra.  We were going to be the film that changed the paradigm.

High Hopes and First Impressions

Several months later, we were ready for our coming out party.  We had worked really hard to put a solid, but not perfect, festival cut together for people to start looking at.  One of our first calls was to The Film Collaborative.  We thought they would probably put us in touch with all the festival programmers at Sundance, Cannes, Toronto, et al, and we could focus on our travel plans for the next year.  Jeffrey Winter, co-executive director of The Film Collaborative, was kind enough to watch our film, and give us some feedback.

I remember reading his comments the first time over, scanning it quickly looking for the words, “great, fantastic, ground breaking, change the paradigm”….but I didn’t see them.  So I read the email again a bit more carefully.  Maybe I missed it.  “Not a festival film.  Difficult to market.  No marketable name talent.  Challenging subject matter and run time will make it difficult to program.  Proceed with modest expectations”.  This had to be a mistake.  Maybe the DVD screener got mixed in with someone else’s packaging.  I read the comments over, and over again.  Maybe if I read them often enough, cursed them loudly enough, they would magically transform into the words I was looking for.  That never happened.

Filmmakers Are Often In Denial

We went ahead anyway and applied to all the major film festivals and some regional ones as well.  A year later, and a folder full of spiritless rejection form letters, we hadn’t been accepted into any film festivals.  Maybe Jeffrey Winter was on to something.

Putting away those dreams of being courted by rabid, hungry distributors, waving seven figure blank checks in the air, was hard.  It was more than a dream, it was almost an expectation.  Make a great film, and the rest will come.  Didn’t anyone know that we were going to be the one?

We asked our sales agent, Glen Reynolds from Circus Road Films, to start reaching out to distributors.  1% of all feature film applicants get into Sundance.  Maybe it’s less.  Out of that 1% maybe half get some distribution opportunity.  A long and painful eight months or so had passed waiting to get into a film festival, with no results.  It was time to roll up our sleeves, and take back some of our own fate.

What happens to films that don’t win the Palm D’Or or the Grand Jury Prize?  What happens to films that aren’t on the other end of Harvey Weinstein’s phone call?  The first thing we needed to understand was that no one was going to do the hard work for us.  There simply is no substitute for grinding it out, and doing the dirty work.  The Film Collaborative, along with other indie film organizations like Film Courage, IFP, Film Independent, San Francisco Film Society, and Hope For Film, to name just a few, all have archives full of useful information written by filmmakers for filmmakers.  We scoured them all, looking for nuggets of truth in every success story, hoping to recognize some shared path to that pot of gold.  The only thing those stories shared in common, was that there was no common path to success.  They were as unique as the films they made. 

Distribution For The 99%

Finding a distributor via our sales agent didn’t take very long.  After maybe two months of sending out screeners (or viewing online screeners), we had a handful of distributors that were interested in distributing our film.  Hallelujah.  Victory!  Time to celebrate and take a much needed sigh of relief.  We reached out to TFC again and sought out their counsel to help us make the best decision.  We explored DIY distribution, and traditional VOD/Digital distribution, making sure we understood all the variables and decisions that went into each approach.  I had a conversation with TFC founder Orly Ravid about our options, and she told us that our film wasn’t mainstream enough for any distributor to really go out on a limb for us.  We could:

1) bypass the traditional distributor and go with a DIY approach, put in a lot of additional time, energy, and money with no guarantees of success; OR

2) sign on with a traditional distributor and manage/lower our expectations.  Orly made it very clear that no distributor was going to spend a lot of money or expend a lot of energy marketing the movie.  Whatever we could get them to commit to, we should try to get in writing.

That bit of honest feedback was an unexpected buzz kill, and didn’t exactly sound like a reason to celebrate.  After going through our options again and really assessing the pros and cons of each approach, we ultimately chose to go with a traditional distributor, Grand Entertainment Group.  Grand is a new distribution company that focuses on championing unique and innovative voices, founded by long time home entertainment executives that had 20+ years of experience distributing independent films for Lionsgate and ThinkFilm, among others.  We felt they could help us reach a much wider audience than we could ever reach on our own.  There was just no way for us to get our DVDs onto store shelves at Walmart or Best Buy, or land a cable TV deal without their help and prior relationships.

Two long years after we finished shooting the film, finally our work was done.  Everything would be clearer, and all of our problems would get solved once we signed with our distributor.  Right?

Our Moment of Truth

It’s at this critical stage, that films either go on to thrive and find success or get completely lost in a giant swamp of never to be seen again films.  No one cares about your film more than you do.  Not your sales agent, your producer’s rep, your distributor, your publicist, no one.  To them, as committed and dedicated as they might be, it’s still a job.  To you, it’s your life.  This goes back to the question you should have asked yourself when you started:

How badly do you want to do this?  Are you prepared to do everything it takes, and make all the necessary sacrifices, personal and professional, to ensure your film will be made and seen by an audience?

My producer, Casey Poh, gave me a statistic from his studies at the Peter Stark Producing Program at USC:  It takes a $5M minimum marketing spend to make a dent in DVD sales.  I don’t know how true that is, but for argument sake, let’s say it’s only 10% of that, which is still $500,000.  There are no distributors in the world that will spend that kind of money on your movie if it didn’t win Sundance, SXSW, Toronto, etc., and definitely not for a film like TENTACLE 8.  But we still had some false notions that our work was done, and that our distributor was going to be out there marketing the film 24/7.

Thankfully, like most independent filmmakers, we’re obsessive.  So we plan, and plan, and plan, down to the very last detail.  Website updated, new content on Facebook every day up until the DVD release, maintain and energize the interest of our cast and crew.  Be active on Twitter, start tweeting things that make you an interesting follow.  Share interesting things about other people and other interests.  Repeat and accelerate.  List all the things you want to have happen:  NY Times review, University and College theatrical tour, major launch parties, DVD premiere at the Arclight, Spirit Award Nomination.  Didn’t people remember that WE were the one?

My Moment of Clarity

With only a few weeks to go before our DVD release date, we noticed that our wish lists were still only wish lists.  Our action plans were gathering e-dust, and we weren’t any closer to making them happen than the day we typed them into our laptop.  We had put years into getting the film to this point.  There was no one to blame other than ourselves if it tanked.  As the creator of the material, as the producer/director/writer of the film, there was no one else more responsible for marketing and promoting the movie than me.  No one else was going to come to my rescue.  Not my friends, not my family, not my producers, my sales agent, my distributor, no one.  I had to give them a reason to believe that my film was worth their time, their attention, their money.  Just maybe after I had done all the groundwork, someone might be inspired to help.  As soon as I came to terms with that, it was much easier to move forward.

We did an inventory of the assets we had:

  • We had made a movie about the NSA, which by an incredible stroke of fate, had been splashed across the headlines in the previous months;
  • We had several soap opera actors with very popular and loyal followings from their fans;
  • We had made a completely original and different kind of movie that I could articulate to others with clarity and passion.

We had to mobilize our assets as quickly and as provocatively as we could to all those outside our bubble of cast and crew.  Prior to our DVD release, there were three very influential moments that impacted our awareness:

1) NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden became an international headline;

2) Not so random acts of kindness and generosity from Soap Opera Network, Go Into The Story, and Film Courage;

3) I realized NO ONE WAS COMING TO RESCUE ME if I didn’t fully and actively solicit an audience for my movie.

Our Watergate Moment

Casey had mentioned months ago that we needed a Watergate moment to spark some interest in the movie, in reference to ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, a movie that inspired TENTACLE 8.  I laughed off that notion, but as fate would have it, news of NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, splashed across every news headline around the world.  We finally caught a break.  As tragic and as difficult as it was for Mr. Snowden, it was something that we had to capitalize on.  We started branding the movie as the NSA-themed Independent Feature Film.  I used that as the header for every unsolicited email I wrote to every journalist, blogger, activist, and film enthusiast I could find on the internet.  I started making bold and provocative statements on Twitter regarding privacy rights, and the treatment of whistleblowers, always making sure I hashtagged #TENTACLE8 with #NSA.  Slowly but surely, we were building an awareness and interest in both the film, and us as filmmakers.

When Life Gives You Lemons, Make Soap

We also had several cast members who had a large soap opera following, as current and former stars on some very popular soap operas. Joshua Morrow stars on the very popular “The Young and the Restless”, Matthew Borlenghi had a long and successful run on “All My Children”, as did John Callahan on “All My Children” and “Days of Our Lives”, veteran character actor Bruce Gray was on several popular soaps, and Teri Reeves, who most recently starred in NBC’s “Chicago Fire,” was a one-time “General Hospital” regular.  It would be a huge mistake not to reach out to this fan base.

Two weeks prior to our DVD release, I reached out to the Soap Opera Network, and wrote them an email introducing myself and the movie.  A few days later, Editor in Chief, Errol Lewis and West Coast Editor Kambra Clifford responded.  We had several very enthusiastic email exchanges describing what we were looking to do, and they agreed to publish and promote an article on the film, and our actors.  We’ve continued to discuss ways in which we can cross promote our mutual interests.

Scott Myers and Go Into The Story

I had written close to a hundred unsolicited emails to almost every film journalist, critic, blogger, and movie enthusiast in the indie film world known to Google.  There’s something to be said for a well crafted email to introduce yourself, why you’re writing them, and a little about your film.  It’s probably no accident that influential screenwriter and screenwriting teacher, Scott Myers, was one of the very few people who responded.  His blog, “Go Into The Story” is widely considered to be one of the most influential screenwriting blogs on the internet.  It was a real break for us that Scott offered to do a brief write up on the making of TENTACLE 8, as part of his “Movies You Made” series.  This was exactly the right audience that would appreciate an intricately written, complex, and thought provoking movie like ours.  The feature was posted a day before our DVD release, and links tweeted continuously for about a week.  We continue to use that feature in our marketing efforts.

Film Courage

Lastly, I would say our feature on FilmCourage.com was the single most influential piece of internet marketing that helped our success.  Karen, David, and April were among the most gracious and hospitable collaborators we were lucky enough to work with, during the entire process.  They just inherently understood our situation and wanted to help.  Like The Film Collaborative, their followers are really loyal and dedicated to the independent film cause and help filmmakers educate themselves.  Being featured on their site gave us some much needed credibility and visibility with the community that we wanted our film to be a part of.

Early Exit Poll Results

After eight days of release, our initial DVD allotments sold out at WalMart, Best Buy, and Amazon.com.  IMDB put us on a list (#12 out of 192) of Most Popular Independent Feature Films released in 2014, based on their Movie Meter Rankings.  Considering there are thousands of movies made each year, this was an incredible feat, given we’re such a small film.  It goes to prove that a small, but dedicated following can move mountains, and probably has a greater chance at long term sustainability.

There’s no magic solution, you just have to grind it out and do the work.  Hundreds of tweets, unsolicited emails, creative Facebook posts, introducing yourself, your film, and your purpose.  There’s no fancy diet, no elaborate exercise machine to get around the fact that if you want to lose weight, you have to eat less and exercise more.  Similarly, if you want to build an audience, there’s no app, or software, or social media guru that’s going to magically build your audience for you.  You do it one follower at a time.

In retrospect, one of the biggest mistakes we made was being a bit too precious about who we followed and didn’t follow on Twitter.  We didn’t quite know how to exploit Twitter at first, but like everything else, we learned on the fly, and were able to course correct in time to build a strong following for the film, and us the filmmakers.

Are we the film that changed the paradigm of what micro-budget independent films are capable of?  We defied the odds in many ways, making a movie without a strong marketing hook, for a niche audience that wasn’t easily identifiable, and we secured DVD and VOD/Digital distribution without getting into one film festival.  We listened and valued all the guidance we got, from TFC and others we sought input from, even though we didn’t always follow their advice.  So did we break the mold?  I’m not sure that matters so much anymore.  We never stopped believing that we could.

April 23rd, 2014

Posted In: case studies, Digital Distribution, Distribution, DIY, Marketing, Social Network Marketing

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Today’s guest blogger, Jan Selby, is in the midst of running her second crowdfunding campaign. Taking the lessons she learned from prior fundraising on Kickstarter, she is using Indiegogo this time. Find out why the switch?

Crowdfunding is not for the faint of heart. It requires months of planning, hard work, and follow-up. It’s worth it if you are prepared and motivated. I’ve launched two campaigns for feature-length documentary films and found them to be powerful strategic tools to help build a community and raise money.

Sheri asked me to summarize what I’ve learned through one successful Kickstarter campaign and a second Indiegogo campaign (currently in progress). I’ve tried to pack as much as I could in this post to share what I’ve learned. I’m not an expert, but I hope my experiences will be helpful to you as you embark on your own crowd-funding journey.

My first bit of advice is to create a team who will work with you for 6 months – 3 months before you launch, then during and after your campaign. I’m a detail-oriented planner by nature.  If you’re not, find someone who is and make him/her part of your team. It’s important to avoid launching your campaign until you are fully prepared. Do all you can to be ready before you launch because you’ll be incredibly busy during your campaign.

How long should your campaign be? Most campaigns do best in the first and last week. As one friend told me, “The longer your campaign, the longer your time of suffering in the middle!”  I like having a week or so to spread the word about the campaign before the 30-day countdown begins. I also plan to use the first few days to work out the kinks that are inevitable, no matter how hard you planned ahead.

Campaign 1: Kickstarter 

My first campaign raised $21,112 to complete my first feature documentary, 9 Pieces of Peace (working title). You can check out the campaign home page at the URL www.9piecesfilm.com/fund.  Notice this URL is not the one we were assigned by Kickstarter. Create your own URL that is easy to remember and that you can use after your campaign ends. Research how to redirect your new URL to the Kickstarter URL and then you can choose what to do with it after the campaign ends. I’ve kept it directed to our Kickstarter page, but you could also redirect it to a “Donate” page on your film website.

There are three core elements of a crowdfunding campaign home page. Before you launch, you will need:

1. A pitch video/film trailer

Having both a pitch and film trailer is important if you can swing it. It’s great if the production quality can reflect your capabilities and your vision for the film, but don’t obsess over it if it can’t. Be creative and speak from the heart. Mine weren’t as good as the film will be, but they worked. Consider combining them as I ended up doing in my second campaign.

2. Well-designed rewards

Take the time to research what others have done. Carefully calculate the direct and indirect costs to deliver each reward (including the fees you will pay to the platform and the credit card processor), including shipping and your time. Add 3 to 6 months to when you think you can deliver the reward because everything takes longer than you expect. You can’t change the reward description once someone has given at that level, so be sure to add all the details.  Leave room to add new levels. Be thoughtful about the language you use and be consistent. For our Kickstarter campaign, we chose to use the words “backer” and “supporter” plus “rewards” and “pledges”. (For my second campaign on Indiegogo, we are using “donors” and “perks,” but it’s a very different film and campaign.)

3. Well-written text.

Write text that tells your story, builds trust, and motivates the reader to want to be part of the community that makes your film happen. Use subheads to break up the text and add images/graphics to make it more interesting. Remember that MANY people have no idea about how crowdfunding works, so write text for an audience that doesn’t understand it. You can change the text of your page during the campaign, but not once it’s over, so be sure you are happy with the way it looks at the end of your campaign.

Once you have your home page content defined, you might think you are ready to launch. Not yet. Here’s a partial list of what I recommend you and your team do before you launch your campaign.

Network Build up your community of followers on all your social media channels (if you don’t have them, get them), build an email list, network with organizations whose members would want your film to be made, and create a media list to use during the campaign. Meet with anyone who might be interested before and during the campaign.

Develop content and plan promotions Develop your page content, design an e-blast/e-newsletter template, design and print postcards, design a flyer that you and others can post, define your social media messaging calendar and graphics/clips/quotes/images (we used Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+), create a graphic that tracks your fundraising progress and plan to use it to update your Facebook cover image daily, define your online advertising campaign strategy (we created and analyzed Facebook and Google ads), define thank-you surprises for supporter updates, and define incentives that you’ll use to entice prospective supporters (our Kickstarter page highlights the last one we did at the top of it).

Get lots of sleep.

Once you launch your campaign, your priority will be communication. Kickstarter (and other platforms) are designed for social media users. Yet, to maximize your chances of success, you need to reach beyond these boundaries.

I sent private Facebook messages to hundreds of people and this worked incredibly well. I also sent hundreds of email messages out to friends who don’t use Facebook and had never heard of Kickstarter. Each message briefly explained the campaign, the status of it, and a request to either contribute or spread the word. Our team distributed thousands of postcards that directed people to our Kickstarter page and emphasized the purpose of the film and the “all or nothing” aspect of the campaign to create a sense of urgency (which was real!).  I set up coffee/lunch/drink meetings with friends, turning them into evangelists and sending them off with stacks of postcards.

Remember to continually thank your growing list of supporters! Most platforms make it easy to send out updates. Your supporters want to hear from you. They are also your best advocates. They are invested in your campaign in more ways than one. If you can keep them energized, they will continue to share it.

Communication is time consuming, whether it is online, by phone, or in person.  Your team can help in many ways. Together, your goal is to expand your reach as far as possible to people who will care about your project. You never know where your money will come from.  Sure, there will be low hanging fruit, but I was shocked when my largest contribution came in on THE LAST DAY from someone whom I hadn’t seen for a year, but who had been following the campaign the whole time, unbeknownst to me.

Overall, our Kickstarter 9 Pieces of Peace campaign was a resounding success, but I must admit, it was very stressful. It was hard for me to sleep or relax for the entire 39 days (and 936 hours).  I kept thinking: How would I forgive myself if I didn’t reach my goal because I hadn’t worked hard enough? (Yes. Very type A.  Can’t help it. Born that way.)  Was I happy with the results? Definitely! The moment I saw online that I had reached my goal, I unexpectedly burst out crying. I think it was a combination of the joy of reaching my goal and the relief that it was over. It’s important to be honest with yourself about if you and your team are up to the challenge.

Campaign 2: Indiegogo

When it was time to launch my second crowdfunding campaign for a documentary film about the transformative power of Montessori education, Building the Pink Tower (working title), I wanted to try a different approach. To be perfectly honest, I was still burned out on the stress of an all or nothing Kickstarter campaign a year later and didn’t know if I wanted to take on that level of intensity again.   But my co-producer/co-director, Vina Kay, and I chose Indiegogo because we felt it was a better match for our film.

If you conduct more than one crowd funding campaign, you may be able to build upon the community of supporters you establish with each one.   For me, there wasn’t much overlap between the two audiences (except for a few family and friends).

It’s important to think about niche audiences for your film and use this information to create a strategy for your campaign. For this crowd funding campaign, we have the opportunity to tap into an existing group of supporters. There is an established Montessori network – people who love it because they have had a direct experience with it either as a student, parent, or teacher.  Vina and I spent the last two years learning about and connecting with this Montessori infrastructure in the U.S. and beyond. Our fundraising trailer had been viewed more than 15,000 times on You Tube, and a short video we created that reflected the vision for our film had been viewed more than 50,000 times.

Our current goal of $50,000 is high, but we feel we have the potential to reach it with the support of this passionate Montessori community. We had secured challenge grants of $20,000 as an added incentive to help us reach our goal. Most importantly, although we are optimistic, we want to be able to keep the money raised if we fall short of our goal. For these reasons, we felt Indiegogo was the best platform for this campaign.

In addition to what we did for our Kickstarter campaign, here’s a list of a few more tricks we are trying on this campaign:

-We created fewer “perk” levels and designed them to minimize our expenses; we combined our pitch and trailer into one video; we created a digital image that “donors” could use as their Facebook profile photo; we created photo/quote graphics that are popular reposts on Facebook; and we have paid to “boost” posts on Facebook with strong results.

 

Indiegogo Pink Tower sharable Pink Tower Facebook profile pic

-In addition, we have created opportunities to have our campaign mentioned in Montessori media, at national conferences, and in school newsletters.

-We are also grateful to be working with a public relations expert who is donating her time to help us explore how we can attract the attention of the local and national media.

One last topic that is important to consider for any crowd funding campaign is whether a donation is tax-deductible. Both of my films have a fiscal sponsor (IFP MN). This allows donations made through the fiscal sponsor to be tax deductible.  This means that when a donation is made through Kickstarter or Indiegogo, it isn’t tax-deductible. Many people won’t care about this, but a few do. We have handled this by having a brief mention on our Indiegogo home page with a link to our fiscal sponsor donation page. Donations made through this page do not count toward our Indiegogo goal. I have since learned that there is at least one fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, who has a relationship with two platforms (Indiegogo and RocketHub) that will allow donations to be tax-deductible. It would be worth looking into whether you can gain fiscal sponsorship. [ed. It can take time to qualify, so do this long before you launch a campaign].

Our Building the Pink Tower Indiegogo campaign ends on December 18th. To follow our progress, visit www.donatepinktower.org.  If you know anyone who has been touched by Montessori education, please share our campaign with him or her.  We are committed to making a film that will change the national education debate. (Thank you!).

I wish you the best of luck in your crowd funding endeavors.  I hope sharing what I’ve learned so far will contribute to your future success!

 

Jan Selby is a multiple regional EMMY© award-winning producer, director, and founder of Quiet Island Films, a full-service video production company with national clients. After 25 years in corporate marketing, Jan followed her heart to become a filmmaker and video producer/director. Follow Building the Pink Tower on FacebookTwitter and add them to your circle on G+ 

 

 

 

November 21st, 2013

Posted In: crowdfunding

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Today’s guest post is from Gabriel Diani & Etta Devine who are actively campaigning on Kickstarter for their film Diani & Devine Meet The Apocalypse. They have some sobering news for those looking to wade into crowdfunding. 

We knew it would be tough. We’re not famous, our project wasn’t based on an existing brand, and only seven percent of Kickstarter campaigns over $100,000 make their goal. Seven percent.

We’ve run two successful campaigns in the past. One publishing campaign for $30k and a film campaign for for $27k . Because of that experience, we knew we couldn’t hit $100k with our current social media/audience reach, perhaps $60k or $70k…but $100k might as well be $1m.

We decided to do something big and bold for our latest Kickstarter to fund our movie Diani & Devine Meet The Apocalypse.  Something to expand our audience and get the attention of press outlets who are becoming weary of crowdfunding stories. With that in mind, we planned a massive 30 plus video Kickstarter campaign featuring our friends and fellow cast members.

We’d start with our main campaign video to introduce ourselves, lay out what the project was about, and give people a hint of what we had in store for the rest of the campaign. We’re not fans of the filmmaker-sitting-in-front-of-the-webcam-crying videos because we believe that if you’re asking people for money to make a movie, you need to show you know how to make a movie.

We stopped cutting our hair or shaving and over the course of four months we went to seven different apocalyptic locations (some up to 3 hours drive away) to shoot the different segments of the video, slowly distressing our costumes until they were dirty rags by the end.

While we were doing that, we also shot thirty mini-shorts called “Apocatips” with the intention of releasing one for every day of the campaign. This would give us new content to post to keep backers engaged and give us new things to talk about. We also put a bunch of our talented friends in them so they would be more enthusiastic about sharing them with their circles when they came out…because we’re sneaky like that.

We also have several famous genre actors with active fan communities and we wanted to target those audiences to pull them into our campaign. We made a video with Armin Shimerman and Harry Groener who are both very well known and respected for their work in “Star Trek” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and targeted the video to those audiences.

Barry Bostwick was going to be in Romania while we were prepping the Kickstarter so we gave him a script outline and he shot a bunch of crazy footage while on set for “Scorpion King 4.” We sifted through all that footage and put this together with our editor Chad Meserve.

But our biggest gun was Janet Varney, the voice of the main character in a popular anime show called “The Legend of Korra.” The audience is rabid, active (because the show is on right now), and a younger demographic that is perfect for understanding what crowdfunding is. We shot a funny video with Janet dressed as her character and knew that it had the potential to go viral.

Has it worked? 

We know a lot of people in the crowdfunding world and they have all been very complimentary about not only the quality of the videos, but the quality of our rewards (we believe in giving early adopters to our cause more bang for their buck) and the beauty and clarity of our Kickstarter page (thanks to our designer Lee Thompson).

The Apocatips have done the job of keeping our backers engaged and giving them new things to share and talk about each day, as have the supplementary videos.  We’ve gotten some great press, but the pledging through those outlets is way down from when we did our previous campaigns and most outlets seem unimpressed by the quality and quantity of the videos and usually only mention it as an aside.

The biggest surprise was the Janet Varney/Korra video, which exceeded our wildest expectations in terms of fan response. As of this writing, it is over 42,000 views on Youtube, gifs people made from it have been reblogged multiple thousands of times on Tumblr, and all of the comments on the Youtube page have been overwhelmingly positive.  It’s difficult to tell because the Kickstarter backend tells you the total pledges that came through Youtube or Tumblr, but not which specific video or post. All of those eyes on the video brought us around 13 pledges…maybe 20 if we’re generous…out of over 42,000 people watching. We had planned on a 0.01% conversion rate. We got about 0.0005%. That miscalculation has certainly made things more challenging, but there’s still hope. As of this writing, we’re at 42% with 10 days to go. It’s not where we’d like to be, but we’ve jumped about $15,000 in the past three days so it’s not impossible.

We’re not sure what all of this means for the crowdfunding ecosystem. There’s lots to dissect and many factors at play including diminishing Twitter influence and how the Facebook algorithm for sharing posts has changed drastically to limit the number of friends/followers our posts are shared with since our last campaign. Our first movie has almost 1,000 “Likes” on its fan page. We shared one of our videos on it and Facebook showed it to 38 of those 1,000. This is (of course) to encourage people to pay money to “boost” or “promote” their posts. We’ve been doing this, but our friends and audience who have been sharing aren’t paying to boost their posts so our message isn’t spreading as far or as fast as it could despite the fact that this campaign has been shared more times on Facebook than the last one (136 vs. over 2,000 at the time of this writing).

Our email list is around 2,000 subscribers and we’ve been emailing our backers once or twice a week. All of our previous backers are on that list, but we also sent project updates from those campaigns within Kickstarter in case our email was going to spam. Our number one referrer to our campaign this time is Direct Traffic, which means clickthroughs are coming mostly from this email list. It’s almost twice the traffic from Facebook which is the complete opposite from our last two campaigns.

If you’re thinking of jumping into your first (or next) crowd funding campaign, be more cautious than usual. Ours is an ambitious project to be sure, but we did our homework. We have a track record on both Kickstarter and in the world of independent film and we spent five months writing, shooting, editing, color correcting, and doing VFX on over 30 videos and planning the campaign…and yet we’re still facing a steep uphill climb.

The crowdfunding world is weird and wonderful, but it is constantly changing. It was never easy to raise the type of money we’re aiming for, but as crowdfunding evolves it may be getting harder instead of easier.

Gabriel Diani and Etta Devine are award-winning actors, writers, and comedians who are often compared with classic comedy teams like Nichols and May and Burns and Allen. They have performed at comedy festivals all over the country, raised over $30,000 on Kickstarter to replace the “N-word” with “Robot” in Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” and garnered over 1.3 million hits on their web series Mary Olson. Gabe wrote, produced, and starred in the horror comedy feature film THE SELLING which played at over 30 film festivals, was in the Top 10 of About.com’s Best Horror Movies of 2012, and received rave reviews from The Huffington PostAin’t It Cool News, and FilmThreat. Co-produced by and co-starring Etta, the film is available on DVD/VOD and just had its television premiere on Fearnet in April. You can see their sizzle reel here.

November 13th, 2013

Posted In: crowdfunding, Distribution Platforms

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,


Part 4 in our series on understanding social media tools. Find the rest of the series on these links  Mindset ChangeMythsFacebook, Youtube

Time to reiterate…social tools should not be used only as a means of pushing a product. Paid advertising is the best tool to do that. Social media channels are relationship building tools, so if you aren’t interested in a relationship with an audience, you will find minimal success using them. Starting a Twitter account just a few months or weeks prior to the release of your film will not help gain an audience following that will be loyal and actually support your work. A Twitter strategy should not be cold and calculated-buy, buy, buy. It is extremely obvious to anyone using these tools that you are doing this and it is a turn OFF. Approach the online audience on a human level, using a personal voice. It allows a trust to develop and helps garner more loyalty in the long run.

Pew Research recently released its findings on Twitter users. 16% of internet users are active on Twitter, and the service skews towards black and hispanic users, adults aged 18-29, and folks who live in urban areas. It trails significantly behind Facebook as the dominant social channel, but 400 million monthly unique users visit Twitter.com, and 1 billion Tweets occur every 2 1/2 days.*

For now, Twitter is the main site for second screen activity, with 66% of mobile users  active on the social network in front of their televisions, and 33 percent Tweet about the shows they’re watching.** If you aren’t engaging on Twitter to find and build a relationship with an audience, you are definitely being left behind. Also it is a great way to network with other industry professionals, some you may never have encountered in your every day life.

How does Twitter work? A little bit like text messaging. You are limited to 140 characters in your messages. But unlike text messaging, your messages aren’t sent to a single person, but anyone that follows you–and viewable by the world and cached by search engines. Bear this in mind before starting an argument online or drunk tweeting! It is possible to send one on one messages, also known as DM or Direct Messages, that are only seen by you and the other person. This only works if you follow each other.

There’s a great list of basic Twitter definitions HERE

When getting started with Twitter, choose your account name with care. It should reflect who you are, your “brand voice,” and attract people to follow you. Ideally, you should use your own name and your profile photo and background images should visually represent who you are or what your project is. Do not pick something cute and nonsensical! As opposed to Facebook, you can change your Twitter name, or handle, and all details about your account with ease on your own, so if you have made the mistake of choosing a Twitter name that doesn’t give good representation of who you are or what you are about, you can change it. All account names will be run through a checker to make sure they are unique so you may have to try a few different names if yours is somewhat common.

SHOW YOUR FACE or some visual representation of your company, in the profile image. People like to see the person behind the tweets. Don’t leave this as the standard Twitter egg photo because usually that indicates a spam account or someone not active on the platform. Remember, this is about connecting on a personal level. It is very difficult to build up a following and trust when potential followers can’t see who is behind the account. As a creator, you should use your own professional headshot and make your Twitter background reflective of your artistic style.

Here are a few good examples:

Tiffany Shlain Twitter background

gary hustwit twitter background

Philip Bloom twitter background

Write a clear, concise bio and include a URL link to your professional website or landing page. There are only 160 characters to use in this About section so get to the point and leave a link for people to click to find out more about you. It is up to you to choose whether to name your location city, but do add the country to give an idea of your origin.

Once you have everything set up on your account to make a good impression to potential followers, let’s find some interesting accounts to follow. Using keywords that reflect the type of creator you are and topics you are interested in, find accounts with similar interests in search tools like Twitter itself, WeFollow, Twellow, and Twiends. Twitter will work best for you if you are following interesting people who offer a lot of value. Often, people give up on Twitter early on because they don’t “get” what the platform does. This is the case when you follow a small group of people who also don’t “get” what the platform does. A useful account will give you great links to information, make connections between you and their following, hold regular conversations and generally use Twitter to make connections with people. Be judicious with whom you follow as your newsfeed will fill up with tweets on a constant basis and you want that stream filled with useful content, not irrelevant or obnoxiously self promotional crap.

For a while, you should only “listen” and take in the way people interact with each other. Best not to start in with “Hi world, I’m on Twitter. Check out my work” because your first impression will not be good. As with all things social media, overt self promotion is not appreciated and won’t win followers straight away. When you do launch in, try responding appropriately to a post someone made or retweeting it. You might also post a useful link yourself, prefacing it with why you think it is useful to those with similar interests.

Now, the thing every filmmaker wants to know. How to get followers? Unless you are a celebrity who has built a vast audience on other media channels, attracting followers will take time and consistent effort. You can buy advertising from Twitter in the form of Promoted Accounts which is part of the “Who To Follow” feature suggesting accounts that users don’t currently follow and may find interesting. More info on that HERE.

You could also go the no monetary cost route by doing these things:

-Make sure that your Twitter handle is posted on all of your communication including email footer and newsletter, website, other social channels, business cards and your official bio that you use in festival catalogs, at the bottom of a guest blog post, really any About You section. The easier you make it to find your Twitter handle, the more followers you will get. Makes sense;

-Tweet interesting things! The more links to great content you post, the more likely people are to retweet (RT) it, thus spreading your Twitter handle to more potential followers;

-Interact with other twitter accounts. Remember, this is conversation in 140 characters. Take few minutes of your day at least twice a day to drop in on those you follow and see what they are talking about. See what you might add to that conversation;

-Post your own links several times a day. The Twitter stream moves very fast so if you post something only once a day, or once every few days, it gets buried quickly. Post several times throughout the day, every day. Where to find these links? Use TalkWalker or Feedly to monitor blogs and publications that post news relevant to your interests and the interests of your audience. You can post these on your other social channels too;

-Take part in Twitter hashtag (#) discussions. On Sunday night, there is a weekly Tweetchat for scriptwriters (#scriptchat). On Wednesdays, a weekly Tweetchat for post production people (#postchat). Almost every film related live event has a hashtag associated (#sheffdocfest, #sundance, #ifpweek, #LAFilmFest etc) and by participating in these events, even if you can’t attend, you will interact with people on Twitter with similar interests and it helps build up a following. You can also do this for events or discussions related to your target audience. Related to hashtag discussions-anytime you post something that is of interest to your target audience, use a hashtag within the tweet so that those who follow hashtags will see it (ie. Making a ballet film? use #ballet. Making a film about civil disobedience? You may want to connect with those following #Taksim or #occupygezi right now). To find popular hashtags, check HERE;

-Did you read a great post or see a great film by someone you want to know on Twitter? Give them an @ mention complimenting their work or sending congratulations. Chances are you will get a follow by that person. Be genuine. Do not use this in an obsequious manner, it is very obvious;

-Include your account to Twitter directories like the ones I mentioned above so your account will be found by others;

-Add a Twitter widget to your website that displays a list of your latest tweets and a button to follow your account. These widgets are plug ins that can be integrated into Tumblr, WordPress, Joomla, Blogger etc platforms. Either ask your developer to integrate it or visit the blog platform FAQ section to find out how.

Most people do not manage their Twitter accounts via the Twitter website and often they use mobile devices rather than a computer. Tools such as Hootsuite allow you to set up columns on one screen to see your newsfeed, your @mentions, your DMs, your Sent tweets and any other keyword or hashtag you want to follow. If you manage more than one Twitter account, you can set that up in Hootsuite too.

hootsuite dashboard

As with anything online, you will want to monitor your results. Obviously, you’ll want to see your follower count climbing, but you should also want to know what kind of material you are posting that is making an impact by being shared (RTd), how many people are interacting with you and who they are (these are your super fans), and whether your activity on Twitter is driving interest in your work. Tools like TweetReach, Who Shared My Link?, Who Tweeted Me,  and Google Analytics to measure the Twitter traffic to your website. A great article on how to set that up HERE.

A few Twitter DON’TS:

-Don’t autofollow. You want a quality news feed, not one full of useless tweets;

-Don’t automatically cross post to all of your other social channels. For example, Twitter only allows 140 characters and Facebook allows more. Short posts on Facebook look weird and  long posts on Twitter get cut off at 140 characters. Post separately!
-Don’t use auto responders. It is possible to set an automated direct message every time some new follows you, but it looks really spammy so don’t do that.
-Don’t use too much self promotion. 80-20 rule. 80% of your posts will be about things that interest you and your followers; 20% can be self promotional;
-Don’t protect your tweets. Some people only want a small number of people to see their tweets in a semi closed environment. If the point of using Twitter is to grow your fanbase and professional network, protected tweets are the opposite of doing this;
-Don’t be a jerk/overly emotional/drunk. Remember, everything you post can be seen by anyone, at any time. Really think about what you post before you hit SEND.
-Don’t beg for RTs and followers. As a rule, begging is a turn off. If you are posting great links and ideas, you don’t need to ask people to pass them along.
The next and final post in this series will cover Youtube. We hope you are finding these tips useful. If you have a question or comment, please leave it on our Facebook page or Tweet us @filmcollab.

 

June 19th, 2013

Posted In: Marketing, Social Network Marketing

Tags: , , ,


For the next several weeks, we will feature information for filmmakers who want to get started in using social media for their personal career and for their projects. These posts will be very basic in nature as we have realized that many members are confused/apprehensive/non tech savvy and we want to encourage them to be excited and proactive about sharing their work with an audience. At the heart of all social network marketing is the authentic, human need to connect and communicate with like minded people. This first post will prime you for the mentality change you need to succeed in using social channels. Quick jump to subsequent posts MythsFacebookTwitterYoutube

Changing the mindset and finding the time

Before starting with questions like which is better, Facebook or Twitter, we need to recognize that the whole idea of sharing online and communicating directly with an audience takes a monumental shift in thinking. While it was the accepted norm that an artist would be separated from her audience and expected to create away from the public eye, only allowing them to see the work when it was launched into the market, this is no longer the case. Artists, and all people and companies really, are now expected to be open, accessible and willing to speak with the public.

Whether one agrees with this expectation is immaterial, it is a fact and those unwilling to accept it are quickly falling behind. Are there well known artists who haven’t accepted this, who still enjoy popularity despite being inaccessible? Yes, for the time being. But 99% of artists reading this post do not fall into that category and cannot compare themselves to these personalities. Even within that category of artists, there is a changing mindset with very prominent directors (ie., Ron Howard, William Friedkin, Darren Aronofsky, Spike Lee etc), cinematographers (Roger Deakins, Matthew Libatique), producers (Frank Marshall, Dana Brunetti, Gale Anne Hurd) and screenwriters (John August, Craig Mazin, Roger Avary) actively using social channels on a consistent basis. If they can find time in THEIR schedules, so can you and you must.

audience shouldn't be disposable

Ending the disposable audience mentality

Every project you make is a startup product, but meant to further the whole of your career in the future. Your body of work should build on itself, growing in experience and helping to push out to the wider world with each successive project . However, it is a mistake to think that audiences also have to be looked at as a new startup with each new project. I would like to do away with the practice of discarding the audience after a film has run through its release windows. This goes for artists as well as distributors. It is extremely wasteful and even rude to court an audience for a period of time and then drop them only to start up again in a year or two or to regard them as mere receptacles for your one way advertising messages. The audience is growing used to expecting access on a near constant basis with brands (if you are an artist, you are a brand) and your brand needs to be more than a logo. It has to be a personality, an identity, it has to show the world what you believe if you expect any loyalty or relationship.The days of viewing your audience as some abstract entity or eyeballs with wallets are over and the days of thinking that all you have to do is make great work and it will just be found are over. Artists need to start cultivating their own audiences for a sustainable living.

Starting from Open, Random and Supportive*

Closed, Selective and Controlling. This is the mindset we have been used to in most aspects of the arts and in business. We have been operating mostly away from the public, hidden behind a logo and faceless entities we hired to speak for us (distributors, managers, agents and publicists). We listened to selective voices and we allowed only a selective group behind our closed doors of creation. We controlled all access in how our work was seen, experienced and who could talk about it or share it. This is NOT the world we live in any longer.

we're open

We need to open ourselves up to meeting all kinds of people and listening to all kinds of voices. Openness helps us grow. Be Open in accepting that this change in how people communicate has already happened, no matter how much you wish it hadn’t or how much you think it is just a phase. A major change in human communication has happened and the days of closed, selective and controlling are not returning.

Accept Random information. There is an endless supply of information streaming at us every day and the answer is not to cut yourself off from it. Learning to filter the noise, analyze the random in order to find the relevant is becoming a human skill that we will need in order to evolve and survive. Our children are already learning to do this, we need to catch up.

The Internet operates best in an open environment where sharing information, educating people, and building a large number of connections breeds success. Rather than thinking from greed and competition, think about how much faster you can grow your success by being Supportive of others and giving instead of only figuring out how to take from them.

Social channels are only tools

No matter which channels you choose, know that they are only tools to help accomplish your goals. When evaluating the tools, be realistic about the strengths you are going to bring to them yourselves. If you aren’t much of a writer, blogging probably won’t be a good tool for you I don’t care how much people say you should blog. Having a poorly maintained blog is worse than having no blog. If shooting video or photos is more your speed, then using Youtube, Instagram, Vine etc are tools on which to concentrate. If you would rather engage in short, pithy dialogue, Twitter will be your best tool. Not only will you need social accounts, you will need to populate these channels regularly. If you pick a tool that is torture to maintain, you won’t do it and you won’t accomplish much with it.

Goals to accomplish**

One goal for artists is to secure funding and one of the biggest opportunities in funding art projects is crowdfunding. You know what is at the foundation of successful crowdfunding? Having online connections with a core group of supporters.  Crowdfunding can help you expand an audience, but it is extremely rare to have a successful campaign starting at zero connections. If you don’t have an active presence online, it will be exceedingly difficult to raise money this way.

Another goal is industry networking. I haven’t met a first time or unknown filmmaker yet who didn’t say they wanted their work to be a calling card to lead to future work. While you can tour the festival circuit or hit all of the pitchfests in hopes of making industry connections, you can also accomplish this by following prolific industry executives online and interacting with them in a valuable way. Valuable in this instance meaning how you show your value to them, not how they can be valuable to you. We’ll talk about adding value in subsequent posts.

Reaching a group of interested people. While you can do this only through releasing remarkable work, you can do this on a daily basis as well. In sharing what drives you artistically, professionally, you can pull in those who have the same sensibilities as yourself. You can also be a catalyst for meaningful dialog and change. If the thing that drives you as an artist is to raise awareness or give a voice to the voiceless through your work in a visual medium, you can do the same thing on social channels every day. You can mobilize communities and create change.

In the next post, I will talk about the main myths behind social network marketing and you may recognize a few that you believe to be true. In subsequent posts I will highlight the main social channels in use today. Bear in mind that new channels are being adopted and existing ones are being replaced every day. Also there are near constant changes to the capabilities on existing channels. Such is the challenge to using these tools, but the core of what you are trying to do with them is not changing. Connecting and relationship building with an audience will become a cornerstone of your creative success no matter what online tools you use.

*based on this talk from Thomas Power.

**based on Jon Reiss’ 5 goals common to filmmakers when releasing their work

 

 

 

May 29th, 2013

Posted In: crowdfunding, Marketing, Social Network Marketing

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,


A continuation of the previous video interview, Writer/Director Edward Burns talks about  the value of using Twitter to connect with his fans and collaborate with them on his projects…to a point. His next project, Winter Spring Summer Fall, is now in production with a Kickstarter campaign planned to help finance the film.

February 28th, 2013

Posted In: crowdfunding, Social Network Marketing

Tags: , , , , , ,


By Sheri Candler

It is a question I was thinking deeply about because I encounter filmmakers and industry players all the time who say that they put up a Facebook page, opened a Twitter account, started a Youtube channel, but the people didn’t come, views didn’t go up and the sales didn’t happen.  So what’s the point? It doesn’t work, clearly. I know they opened those accounts because it is “the thing to do” and besides it was free which is totally budget friendly, but just opening up accounts with no time, commitment, team, strategy, budget to maintain and grow them and truly utilize what they are best at  is not going to work and I recommend to go ahead and close them. Seriously!

Yes, social media is the newest communication tool (really it isn’t that new, but some still think it is) and Americans in particular spend almost 80% of their time on the internet (30% are online globally), with 22% of their time on social networking sites and 21% of their time in internet searches (there are over a billion search queries on Google every day!). I’m sure you can find another way to communicate with these people though, perhaps visiting door to door or cold calling or throwing obscene amounts of money into advertising all over the place and crossing your fingers (works for Hollywood). You’ve got that kind of time and money, yes? Honestly, start now thinking about what tools you will be using instead.

artists rarely use social media correctly

Once I look at what is being done with these sites, I am hardly surprised that it isn’t working. Most artists do not have a commitment to building up strong ties with an audience, they do not use social tools for “listening” and researching what audiences respond to, they do not post regularly except for “please make it happen for us on Indiegogo,” “Vote for my film on (name some film contest site),” or “my film is now available on iTunes.” Basically the chatter is all “do something for me” which is really tedious to read (I would say every day, but they don’t usually post regularly). For many publicists, this is how the channels are used as well; here’s a press kit, write about my client except that instead of only reaching writers, they are broadcasting to everyone and rarely listening at all.

 I wrote some time back about how Facebook wasn’t a good sales medium and I still stand by that post though there have been changes at Facebook that affect showing up in a newsfeed and the use of landing pages. Facebook, of course, would have you believe that it is a good sales tool, after all they have the most to gain from perpetuating that idea  in the business community.

If all you are using social media for is sales, STOP. I release you from feeling the burden of using auto tweeting and sending that same message through all of your profiles. No longer should you hire outside companies to do it for you either and pretending to be you. If you have done this, you already know it doesn’t work. Stop paying companies to send 5 prewritten tweets a day about your film to their 60K+ followers. You will not find that it makes much difference if that is the only effort you are making. Stop making inquiries for “some of that social media stuff” so your trailer will “go viral.”

Here is what the tool is very best used for; name/brand recognition, trust and loyalty building, sustained interest, long term sales and that most indescribable feeling of connection that begins to permeate. This is really an emotional space and it is something I would think independent artists would understand, you express ideas and emotions in your own work, right? And you hope to convey that to other people and elicit some kind of emotion from them. I know you don’t usually start from “I’m making a product that’s going to sell” point of view so why do you use social sites that way?

I say indescribable because you can’t point to that one “campaign” that brought your work to someone’s attention, it is an ongoing process that sinks deeper than “a message” or tagline and begins to spread and lasts far longer because little pieces of your thoughts, your connections and projects leave footprints behind online; not just on Twitter and Facebook, but everywhere on the internet globally. Someone who stumbles across your efforts, even years later, can find you and evidence of your work. No ad campaign or newspaper clipping is going to allow for that. Many people point to Twitter streams and Facebook newsfeeds as being fleeting and they are, but you can make more, endlessly. Can you do that for little money with an ad in the Times (pick a city) or a magazine cover story? While you may feel like you reach more people in a short amount of time, there’s a new cover story tomorrow or next month about someone else. There are only so many covers to fill, only so many talk shows to be on, only so much space in the newspaper or magazine for ads. Should you ever use traditional media? Should you ever use advertising? Yes, of course, but now you can have one more tool to use that is available to anyone, anywhere. You can choose to use it or not, but make sure you understand how to use it correctly and commit to doing it, every day. Also come to terms with the fact that if you are choosing not to use it, you are totally dependent on having third parties promote your work. New artists emerge every day and very few companies are truly committed to anyone.

Without a commitment to developing a community of supporters by using social media, save your time and possibly money and find another tool. You won’t be successful here.

 

August 29th, 2012

Posted In: Marketing, Social Network Marketing, Uncategorized

Tags: , , , , , ,

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