Social Media: An Essential Tool For The Indie Filmmaker?

An independent filmmaker wears many different hats: director, writer, producer, investor, et cetera. Now add to this list social media manager. According to some indie filmmakers, a strong social media presence is an absolute must. It’s the best way to build an audience, they say, and it’s an essential tool for carving out a space for your films in a highly competitive marketplace.

But is it really worth all the time and effort? I don’t have a definitive answer to this question – and there probably isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer anyway – but I’ll try to highlight some of the relevant considerations, including some common mistakes and misconceptions.

Let me start by stating clearly that I am not a social media expert. I’m a filmmaker who has been slowly but steadily wading into the waters of social media, and with mixed results. This puts me in a unique position to evaluate the pros and cons, because I don’t have enough of a track record with social media to bias my opinion one way or the other. But I’ve used social media enough – Twitter and Facebook in particular – to know just how much time and effort it takes.

Social Media Success Story

The indie filmmaker’s social media success story goes something like this. Jane makes a great film about her experience as a bird watcher called Jane in the Sky. She builds a Facebook page for the film, and creates a Twitter handle for herself and starts tweeting at bird watchers and other people who might be interested in her film. In a few months, she’s got tens of thousands of “likes” on Facebook, and a large and growing following on Twitter. A few press outlets take notice, invite her for interviews, which leads to more press, invitations to screen her film at festivals, speaking engagements at avian societies, and so on.

Wow! Success and more success. Jane’s social media campaign keeps paying dividends as people click through to iTunes, Amazon, etc., and buy her movie. And now she has a captive audience for her next film, Jane in the Sky 2. When she launches her Kickstarter, it explodes out of the gate because she has so many loyal fans. Within just a few weeks, she’s fully funded and is well on her way to making her second feature.

This is how it is supposed to go, when social media is firing on all cylinders. And it’s the pursuit of dream that drives so many of us indie filmmakers to social media in the first place.

But what happens when your social media campaign is a total flop?

Social Media Train Wreck

Social media campaigns don’t always work out. In fact, I’d venture to say that most filmmakers who are on social media are just wasting their time. This is not because social media is not valuable. It’s because these filmmakers are engaging with social media in all the wrong ways. When social media engagement goes wrong, it looks something like this.

Bob makes a funny and poignant indie comedy about twenty-somethings looking for love in a big city. It’s called Lucy and Lucky. The film is funded through credit cards and a generous “investment” by a rich uncle. It’s still a micro-budget film, though, so no name actors that would attract the interest of distributors. After a short but respectable festival run, Bob pays a third-party content aggregator to get his film onto iTunes, Amazon, etc. Now it’s up to him to drive traffic through an all-out social media campaign.

Bob takes to Twitter and starts blasting out announcements about Lucy and Lucky. By and large, these announcement seem to fall on deaf ears. Likewise with Facebook. Frustrated, Bob decides to pay another third-party company to boost his social media numbers. Before long, he’s up to 40,000 followers on Twitter, and he’s got equally impressive stats on Facebook. But his announcements about Lucy and Lucky continue to fall on deaf ears. No click-throughs. No iTunes sales. No nothin’.

Bob wonders, “What’s the deal? Where are my 40,000 Twitter followers? Why won’t they buy my movie?”

Bob starts aggressively tweeting at celebrities and other “influencers,” as well as press outlets who might be interested in his movie. A few respond and retweet, but all this activity doesn’t really go anywhere.

Epilogue: After spending weeks and months working social media, Bob has made a grand total of $475 from residuals and sales of Lucy and Lucky. Quoting Napoleon Dynamite (one of his models for an indie success story), he grumbles, “That’s like a dollar an hour.” Bob throws in the towel, saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt.

Social Media Reality Check

Bob’s story is real. So is Jane’s. But for most indie filmmakers, their reality lies somewhere in middle.

In my own experience, social media has helped create some interest in my films, and it’s provided a way for me to communicate with people who support my work. I’ve also been able to connect with fellow filmmakers and artists, some of whom I’ve even started to develop relationships with offline.

However, my social media presence is still small, and my ROI so far is certainly less than “a dollar an hour.” In other words, I’ve put a lot of time into Twitter and Facebook, but the dividends are not (yet) tangible. Looking on the bright side, though, I believe that most of my social media followers actually like my work. They are (or at least seem to be) real people with real ideas and real lives outside of the Twittersphere. And at the end of the day, that’s who I want to connect with through my art, my writing, and my social media activity.

Social Media Pitfalls

This is not a “how to use social media” article, so I won’t drone on about the do’s and don’ts. (For a great primer, check out this affordable and highly informative e-book by Chicago social media mavens King is a Fink.) But I do want to flag a serious mistake that a lot of filmmakers make with social media. They seem to forget that it’s a tool. It is a means to an end; it is not an end in and of itself. A large social media presence is meaningless if you don’t actually have some decent films and videos to show your audience. You’re on social media to promote your films and videos, and to boost your career as a filmmaker.

Similarly, a large social media following is useless if your followers are mostly ghost accounts. What’s a large Twitter following worth if it doesn’t translate into something tangible? I’m not even talking about money, per se, but really anything of value to you as a filmmaker – e.g., public engagement with your work, people turning up at your screenings, creative collaborations on future projects, etc.

Taken to an extreme, some filmmakers employ all sorts of trickery to build up a huge Twitter or Facebook following, and this ends up becoming their primary achievement rather than their films. It’s tempting to go down this path, especially with the availability of apps that help you get more likes and followers. You can even buy likes and followers in bulk. This could be useful if you have a legitimate plan for translating all this into something tangible – e.g., ticket sales at the theater, more downloads of your movie, and so forth. But if all you’re doing is building a house of cards on social media, and you’re not actually making films, something has gone terribly awry.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, you can’t pay your rent in likes and retweets (I asked my landlord about this and he said no). What you can do, however, is figure out a way to use all that social media attention to drive traffic to, say, your website, your blog, or your YouTube channel. In fact, social media can be the lubricant between all your websites. But you need to build this infrastructure over time, and the backbone of this should be meaningful content – i.e., your films and videos.

There are only so many hours in the day, and most of us would prefer to spend our time developing our craft as filmmakers, instead of chasing likes and followers on social media platforms. Personally, I’m still somewhat dubious about social media, but I’m also intrigued by its potential. Like any tool, it’s not inherently good or bad. In the hands of a skilled user, and under the right circumstances, it can be extremely powerful. But when social media is misused or abused, it’s a waste of time and energy that could be better spent on making films.

How has social media been useful to you as a filmmaker? And what about social media frustrates you?

Comment below, or choose your favorite social media platform and join the discussion!

(top image source: agbeat.com)