When/if to start a Facebook fan page?

Omar N

Omar N

Active member
Hello community,

I recently just shot a feature length documentary that I am really excited about. Currently I have a deal with a TV station for broadcast later this year, and am hoping to accrue a few more distribution outlets.

We are about 3 weeks away from a rough cut, and hope to have the entire film finished by July of this year. My question is, does anybody know if putting together a Facebook fan page is a good idea, and if so, when the best time is to do that? Seeing as to how we don't have a rough cut yet, I am not sure what I would put on it, other than maybe a brief synopsis and some screenshots?

Would love to get peoples advice.

Thank you!
Omar
 
You're working on a higher professional plane than I am right now and my expertise on social media marketing of a movie mostly amounts to a failed Facebook page for a webseries and a short that both fell through, but I did learn a few things from the failed experiments:

I think the biggest issue with promotion on social media is being able to generate enough BTS material. The FB page is basically a waste if you don't have stuff to post. I had 2000 real fans on my webseries FB page at one point and nothing to give them.

For my first feature (which I'm doing this year on my own), I developed a plan to generate the material, in my case I have a list of 12 posts-to-do now, which I plan so far to post weekly, things that are realistic to do, its stuff like four alternate posters (which I know I can do with my art and design background), 4 tracks from the soundtrack EP posted seperately, a few one-minute-ish BTS videos I know I can make similar to the one below, etc. I add to the list when I think of something. I'm in pre-production stage mind you, planning the promotion phase. Again its a no-budget one-man crew production, I have no team to help me do this, but I'm gonna do what I can to give myself material to promote it.

This short died in development phase but it taught me to make a simple BTS video mostly from stills and voiceover, so it was useful to do:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJjlmrkHNKs&feature=youtu.be

Its funny every moviemaking book Ive ever read says GET PRODUCTION PHOTOS GET PRODUCTION PHOTOS GET PRODUCTION PHOTOS and now I understand why, I think I'm learning that generating stuff to promote the movie is part of making a movie

Hope theres some help there for you
 
Last edited:
Hi Omar,

I'm not a social media expert...so there's that :)

From what I've picked-up second hand, you want to have a page up and populated with some content as early as possible. You'll obviously be able to invite your current facebook network and they'll have content to look at. Screenshots, BTS, other written content, etc...

Another thing that folks are now saying, is that you should start a facebook group and invite everyone that is relevant, so that there is more interaction, and not just a monologue from you. I don't have one, but I am certainly thinking about it.

Either way, best of luck and congrats on your current distribution deal!
 
Facebook is relevant for an older age group, like 24+. We do focus group testing on FB to tightly defined market segments and get invaluable feedback. We recently tested a social justice trailer on FB to people living in Missoula, Winnipeg and Dallas and received responses that allowed me to tweak segments of the trailer. Then we retested it in other markets got a better much response. All this for 30 bucks out of pocket.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top