Production Unit - Social Media

With over a billion people active on facebook and just under that amount of people using instagram (500 million of which use it every day) as well as Twitter with an active user count of over 260 million, social media has become an unstoppable force of influence. Even sites such as Rotten Toamtoes which is a well known film review website can have a massive impact on how well a project will be recieved.

Youtube, Scandals and Captain Marvel

Captain Marvel is an interesting case when it comes to online presencse and the influence a large online fan bases.  According to Bobbie L. Washington writing for Medium Film, When Disney started marketing Captain Marvel, it had a 97% score of people interested with 3% of people not interested in seeing this movie on Rotten Tomatoes. As time moved forward, things started to change and not for the better. As of February 25, 2019, Rotten Tomatoes had Captain Marvel at a record low of 27% of over 45,000 people interested in wanting to see this film which meant that 73% of people were not interested in seeing this film.

There were signs that these numbers were still heading down as the premiere date crept closer and closer. There were YouTube sites reporting on the steady rise of people not being interested in seeing the film on a daily basis. Ticket sales that had Captain Marvel forecast to make an estimated $168 million its first weekend in the beginning but that number too changed to a forecast of just $80 million dollars.

There were reports where people were looking to get their money back following the controversial comments made by Brie Larson but they were denied a refund even though it was weeks ahead of the premiere date. The "scandal" was first discovered when a well known YouTuber decided to check in on how Captain Marvel was doing before closing down for the night and discovered that Rotten Tomatoes had removed the score for people not interested in seeing the film. It was gone. The only thing that was left was just the people interested in seeing the film. Gone also were the negative comments. Who was behind this supposed independent service that the movie industry relied on to promote their films? Who initiated this coup-DE-tat of information obliteration? FANDANGO!! oh you havent heard of them? well thats probably why this still doesn't make any sense to you so let me explain the details looming in the background.

Fandango is a ticket sales company, 30% owned by Warner Brothers and 70% owned by Comcast an American Telebroadcasting conglomerate. Captain Marvel was produced and marketed by Disney, so if disney approached Comcast and Warner Bros when scores on the largely followed Rotten Tomatoes site started to drop rapidly, and asked them to make adjustments to the site so that negative scores/ comments couldnt be seen, I'm sure for a respectable sum of money (that i'm sure Disney can afford) a deal could have been made. This is all speculation of course and i don't want the real moral of the story to go a stray, which is no matter how good your film/ tv series/ doc/ short film whatever it is you're making, if people start giving it negative feedback (especially if you try to then cover it up) then it more than likely will affect it's success.

Being honest with the viewers

Another point i would like to raise about trying to get your project out there especially on social media, is make sure it is a true representation of what your project is. One of the biggest examples of trailers not reflecting the finished product is a film called Suicide Squad.  Written and directed by David Ayer, Suicide Squad is the third entry in the ever growing DC Extended Universe, and it's comprised of several familiar comic book villains who (unwillingly) come together to handle a dangerous situation. The film most notably advertised Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn and Jared Leto as the one and only Joker, with quips and popular licensed tracks in tow. While licensed music is all over Suicide Squad (or all over its opening few minutes, at least), Leto’s Joker has very little actual screen time, especially when compared to how much the trailers, ads, and merchandise showed him.

Leto himself was extremely displeased by this, as were plenty of moviegoers who felt they’d been tricked by the film’s marketing. Also, the film itself wasn’t as light and funny as the trailers would make it seem. According to Leto there was "hundreds of hours" of Joker footage left on the cutting floor after the edit. This kind of deception isn't recived well by audiences, even though it may get people through the door and bu,s in seats for the box office weekend, all it takes is one deceptive trailor and that is it. People don't forget, especially when they are fans. Which could spell out disaster for the predicted second movie that is due to come out August of 2021 as they have now betrayed the cinema goers no matter how good the trailer for the second film looks, no one will trust that that is the film they will see when they go to the cinema. So the moral is.... Do not advertise your project as something it is not, it will simply decrease the validity of your topic and your intergrity as a director/ producer/ editor etc.

Importance of Marketing (and how to do it)

Buying behavior has drastically changed over the past decade, and now more consumers are starting (and often ending) their buyer’s journey online, virtually showing the effectiveness of how digital marketing works. This shift in the way that consumers make purchasing decisions and buy products and services has made digital marketing a must for any business that’s trying to compete in the modern marketplace, regardless of size or industry.

Social Media Marketing

Most brands today are using social media marketing to support their digital marketing campaigns and drive more traffic to their website. Social media marketing involves promoting your content and engaging with your target consumers on social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. This tactic is used in digital marketing to help businesses increase brand awareness, generate more leads, and improve customer engagement.

One of the biggest appeals of social media marketing is that it allows businesses to reach a wider audience online. For example, 79% of American internet users are active on Facebook. If your business is not trying to reach and engage these consumers on the social platform, then you are certainly missing out on an important opportunity to reach new leads.

Social media not only works as its own tactic, but it can also support all of your other digital marketing efforts. For instance, if your brand develops an informative eBook that speaks to your target audience’s pain points, you can use social media to promote the eBook and drive traffic to the landing page for the download. You can then re-purpose pieces of the eBook for future social media posts as a way to generate further interest for the content piece.

If you want to learn more about social media management and how it might fit into your overall digital marketing strategy, be sure to check out our social media management services page where you can find more details about how social media management and advertising fit into your digital marketing strategy.

What We Did

The first thing we made was a facebbok page for people to follow and to raise awareness of the project. Facebook being the most used form of social media we also thought it would be a good place to start as we were most likely to get the largest amount of reactions/ awareness from it. It turns out the page didn't do too badly! From March 10th to April 6th the post was seen by 776 people and 175 of those actively liked or commented on posts from the page. This of course was a restricted number because facebook will offer to "Boost your post" for £26 which means they will bring the post up on more and more of your friends timelines. This can only be expected however as they are a business and they must make money somehow. 

Another social media platform we decided to use is Twitter, most likely to be harder to gain a mass audience but more likely to be seen by proffesionals/ influencers/ industry workers/ scouts as you don't have to be directly friends with someone to see something. Once the Poster was up we noticed somone had liked it that we were not follwing, so we checked out thier profile. 

His name was Graham Jones and he was an Irish Film Maker but what really caught our attention what the contrast in people he followed to people who followed him. Normally most people follow a few more people than follow them and if you are deemed succeful or popular then normally you have quite a few more people follow you than people you follow. But our guy Graham blows everyone out of the water with an astonishing 7 people that he involves himself with as apposed to the ten and a half thousand people who follows what he does. We felt very flattered that he had liked our project and that hopefully word would get around within his circle.