Hello! Another thing I've been up to lately is running the social media account for my short film, which you can follow on Twitter here!
I've never been big into (or big on) social media, it's one of those things I occasionally post on but typically just use to look at my friends' posts rather than making any posts of my own. So naturally, I had very few ideas on how to populate my film's Twitter account with promotional material. I started with a fairly tame "Welcome to the film's social media" post, but didn't know where to go from there.
After checking out several promotional social media accounts on Twitter for different films, I ended up studying the PLANE movie account (found here). I chose PLANE for more than just my familiarity with the film, taking into account the variety in different sorts of promotional material that the account posted.
Some quick facts about PLANE very quickly:
-The promo account on Twitter had just under 1.5k followers, and averaged thousands of views per Tweet.
-The account made 225 promotional Tweets throughout its 5 month marketing period.
-With a budget of $25 million, it grossed $52 million at the box office, making a relatively decent profit.
Taking into account my personal experience with the film and its marketing, I knew that their marketing was RIDICULOUSLY lackluster, airing zero TV ads, with the only advertisement for the film I saw being in pre-movie advertisements at my movie theater and this Twitter account. Keeping this in mind, it's rational to believe that a good chunk of viewers of the film heard of it from Twitter, contributing to the movie's success.
GETTING BACK ON TRACK:
What sort of variety do I mean when I talk about PLANE's marketing posts? Here's some examples of different types of promotional Tweets that I could distinguish in their campaign.
The first type (and coincidentally the first ever post on the account) is the key art poster. Before even revealing any footage or trailers, the marketing team released a simple poster featuring the title, the tagline, and the main actors.
Its direct, to the point, and simple. Fairly easy to recreate. This should be my first "real" post, showing off the key art (or at least different iterations of it) before revealing anything else.)
The second type I noticed was the "stills post", a Tweet that showed off different shots and stills from the movie, without giving away any of the context. This is good to build hype, and would be a good opportunity to post some Behind the Scenes pictures alongside it.
I should post this after a day of filming!
The third type is much easier, and more up my alley- stupid jokes to farm social media impressions. As long as the Tweet has something tangentially related to the film, I can joke about anything in an attempt to "go viral" and start getting followers who otherwise wouldn't have been interested in the film.
The fourth type of post I noticed was anything focusing on the starring actors and showing off their looks/performance. Obviously, if your film has any actors with star power and fame, you want to capitalize off of their reputation and following. So this is another very popular and effective way of garnering social media clout.
(I chose this example because while it shows off Mike Colter, one of the leads in the movie who is fairly well known, it also mixes with the "joke" tweet format that I mentioned above, showing how well different promotional formats can work together.)
The final type of promotional tweet I saw on the PLANE account was the retweeting (the sharing of another user's tweet) of different reviewers or ratings sites discussing the movie, or posting articles about their opinions, in an effort to legitimize their film's quality.
(This won't be possible for my film because there's no sites to review it)
(...unless I fake an article..?)
Overall, this is good insight on how real world films promote their product on Twitter. Expect to see similarly formatted posts on my account soon!
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