Researching Social Media Apps

 Hello there! This is going to be a little bit shorter than other blog posts, because I'm still focused on finalizing the first draft of the script. However, based off some advice that my instructor gave us earlier this week, I'm going to start my social media brand account today! How exciting!!

Ok.. But on which platform?

Typically, social media accounts meant to market films can be on either Instagram or Twitter. While each social media app has their benefits, I chose to go with Twitter for a few reasons. 

    While Instagram is known for its solid reputation as The image-sharing social media app, it has a few drawbacks. First of all, it relies HEAVILY on pictures, and visuals... aren't my strong suit. Additionally, the way you gain followers on Instagram is vastly different to getting followers on Twitter. On Instagram, people just have to kind of stumble onto your account, or have a shared connection with someone both of you are following, which makes it difficult to get the ball rolling if nobody follows you.

     However, a big plus to marketing on Instagram is that anyone involved with the production (directors, actors, etc.) can post about their experience working on it to their own follower-base, and tag (a form of linkage) the brand account, directing all of their followers to your brand. Ultimately though, I ended up not going with Instagram because, admittedly, I'm not very popular on that site... also I rarely post on it, making me not very well-versed in how to get big on it.

But John, I hear you say, You aren't popular on ANY social media app!

….shut up.

    On the other end of social media apps is Twitter. I find myself more attracted to this app because in my personal experiences, I've seen how brand social media accounts flourish in this space, as well as the fact that I more regularly use Twitter, and therefore have a better understanding of the community on that site, and I know how to get big on it. In fact, Twitter almost seems like its starting to change its layout specifically to benefit advertisers. In a recent policy change, the company added new verification badges specifically to verify and highlight brand accounts on Twitter, giving them a sense of legitimacy and specialness.

Furthermore, gaining a following on Twitter is much, much easier than it is on Instagram. While on Instagram you essentially rely on connections between people finding your account, on Twitter, its extremely easy to go "viral" and have your posts exposed to thousands of people through the algorithm, and that's not even taking into consideration how prolific hashtags are on the site, or how easy it is for brand accounts to interact with their followers on Twitter.

Additionally, I've had my own fun with brand Twitter accounts in the past. After seeing a movie's promo account's posts EVERYWHERE on my timeline, I decided to become an avid follower of the film, commenting and liking all of their posts, starting a hashtag supporting the film, and overall being obnoxiously hyped for the film. Admittedly, this was looking to be very clearly a bad movie. However, following my amateur marketing stint for the film, something very interesting started to happen...

On the joke hashtag I had made, people who followed me were barraged with content from this film, and HAD ACTUALLY GONE TO GO WATCH IT. Because of my silly hashtag, people were giving this movie a chance, and by my count, my shenanigans had pushed about two dozen of my followers to go watch it, simply based off of my hashtag jokes. This is an exceptional example of how easy it is to gain traction on Twitter, and its a great real-world application of hashtags.

Naturally, following whatever "success" I had with that movie, I decided to go with Twitter for my own marketing purposes for my film. While I haven't created the account yet (most likely next week, as I'll have the looming draft script done by that point), I can't wait to take what I've learned from watching brands on Twitter grow and apply it to my own film's account. 

I'll be posting later about my first draft of the script, so stay tuned!