………How to increase exposure of your work to a worldwide audience including gaining the attention of film festival’s, VOD distribution channels, fellow filmmakers and large chunks of potential audience. How to use twitter to promote your film.
1. How to use twitter to promote your film? Start early.
It makes all the sense in the world to create a Twitter account for your film before you raise a single buck for it. At the conception stage you use Twitter to add those who are to be involved in the project. If you read our previous post on funding you’ll know that getting crew and cast onboard at the earliest stage is very important, get them in ASAP. If they don’t have twitter accounts it’s quite important that they do, so advise this, and if they need help to build a follower base, simply share with them this post and get them out there working it.
Twitter is brilliant for freelancers and anyone else working in the business, so try to get them to comply, especially if they are at an early stage in their career.
For your films account though, keep it tight and simple, add the crew and cast as and when they come onboard. Include daily tweets about the set up progress and start to look for people who might be interested in funding your work, if you require funding, or look for others who might be able to add instant value.
What camera are you using? Add that company to your follow list. Tweet to them and tell them what rug set-up you plan to use, they might, of they’re decent people, offer you a discount code to get money off the hire or recommend a better more cost effective set-up with their equipment, Twitter is there to help.
The twitter search engine is perfect for finding people interested in funding, and supporting, indie cinema. Look up successfully funded films and reach out to their followers. This is the best place to start to grow interest in your concept work.
2. How to use twitter to promote your film? Be clear and simple in your branding.
Once you start to gain an identity, perhaps you’ve storyboarded the scene or you’ve shot a trailer, add something dynamic as a profile picture and use something similar for your timeline, to get a good idea look at other indie films. Don’t go down the road of making a profile with that whole “Hollywood” look unless, of course, you’re deluded.
Indie cinema isn’t Hollywood, try and keep your look unique and fresh, the obvious approach is always the most ignored — be different with your branding and you’ll get noticed.
3. How to use twitter to promote your film? What are your goals?
Okay this takes some perspective and honesty – rare qualities in the ambitious, but vital for the successful.
Chances are your films best chance is a good funding initiative, followed by a strong run at some medium to large festival circuits, then a solid entry into your portfolio, to be used later to get commercial work or to find a film directors agent.
From what we have seen, filmmakers need at least five successful shorts before they take on a feature. Networks grow and short films open doors, but it is the feature that launches the career, having said this many short filmmakers bypass the feature and move straight into commercial filmmaking. Knowing your goal
will help you to target early on.
3a. Targeting film festivals for submission success.
Use twitter to research the festivals, who has the best message, who has the strongest network, reach out to the festivals, don’t ask for fee waivers, just approach them with a list of questions, build a relation, show them your trailer, then when the time is right, submit. Many festivals like ours offer discounts on submissions, in this day and age of financial restraints we try to do whatever we can to provide value. The best starting point with a festival is to make contact with them. Understand them. Then submit if you think they’re right for you
and your work.
4. How to use twitter to promote your film? What are the best tools?
Auto message new followers and follow the followers of those who are similar to you. Automate your ReTweets from subjects that are relevant and which you care about. Schedule Tweets and manage your social growth through engagements.
JustUnfollow – now CrowdFire… An excellent application when used with some restraint. What this app does very well is show a particular list of followers on a specified account, in the order of the most engaging, the idea is that you use the list to auto follow them with the hope that they follow you back. You can also set up a standard auto direct message that sends automatically to the persons inbox who just followed you. We use this to reward new followers by giving them a 50% discount code when they follow us. For you as a filmmaker we would suggest a link to either your concept art or a trailer.
RoundTeam… Is an auto retweeter, it can be set up to retweet every-time a keyword is used among your follower base (free version) or the entire twitterverse (paid version), this tool helps you to maintain the love to your followers but also, if you don’t mind paying, grow followers quickly
Hootsuite… Set tweets to be sent automatically throughout the week. Really handy if you’re going to have focus elsewhere but you want to continue to be seen.
This site is great for sharing excellent and valuable content to your follower base, without having to be always logged on.
5. How to use twitter to promote your film? How to get noticed.
Outside of the applications mentioned above there is a lot of weight given to those who support your project. Feeding your followers news feed with daily updates helps loads, but it is very important you give some of the love back.
Retweet whatever you see them put out there, reply to their tweets, engage in what they are saying, if they do the same back then you’ve gotten noticed and Twitter is working for you.
6. Include your Twitter marketing in everything.
(Film festival submissions, the lot!)
Always, include the marketing you have been doing prior to any sort of reaching out to either funders, associations or festivals. Having a good Twitter follower base is attractive to supporters, this includes festivals. Let them know the work that you’ve been doing outside of the actual concept and shooting, this will all go in your favour as you look to market audience, festivals and potential distribution channels.