Film Marketing plan - 5 tips

Luddites don’t sell movies. If you want to get the word out about your indie film, you’re going to have to embrace social media. Here are some basic pointers to help get you started with marketing your film.

1. Act Naturally
Even though this is probably the simplest piece of advice imaginable, it can’t be stressed enough. Social media is meant for interacting with people – you don’t want to come of like some weird android. Act like a human being. We’re sure you know how.

2. Diversify
Try to cover all the bases. Facebook and Twitter are essential for posting updates and news; you may also want to try Pinterest and Tumblr for sharing images. For the sake of recognizability, try to secure the same username for each platform.

It may seem like maintaining so many separate accounts might seem cumbersome, but you don’t need to post unique content onto each of them. Third party developers have created tools that allow you to post the same updates onto multiple platforms – for instance, SproutSocial lets you post to both Facebook and Twitter simultaneously, as do Tweetdeck and HootSuite. Tumblr allows you to sync all of your posts with both your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

3. Make Friends
Follow a lot of people who seem like they would be interested in your film. Ideally you’ll want to target influential users, but remember that someone with millions of followers isn’t going to automatically follow you back. Twitter lists are a great tool for finding users with common interests to mass-follow.

4. Engage with Your Followers
Social media is great for sharing news stories, but there’s so much more to it. Create a dialogue – if someone replies, reply back. At the end of the day you’re out to sell your movie, but endless self-promotion will get tiresome to your followers. It all goes back to rule #1. Just be a human being.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Unfollow
They say that breaking up is hard to do, but following someone on Twitter doesn’t have to be a long-term commitment. It won’t look too good if you’re following way more people than are following you. SproutSocial comes in handy here – it automatically maintains lists of users that are not following you back, as well as accounts that have ceased activity in the past few months.

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