Doubting Castle 3: flipped lecture – Social media strategy

Social media has become such a huge part of our lives. Apart from the making communication easier, it is one of the principal ways of marketing your product these days and usually free or for a very less cost. The people you can reach out to via social media is countless if you implement the correct strategies and use the suitable platforms. Also film makers and designers these days publish their work through social media. It is a great way for amateurs and newbies. Apart from this, it is also a great networking tool especially for media professionals.

 

In this blog post, I’ll talk about how social media helps us (media students/professionals) build a network and connect to people in the same field as us so we can communicate, collaborate or critique each other’s work or just exchange ideas. LinkedIn is the best social media platform for networking. You set up your own profile complete with resume which includes your experience, your skills, education etc. It gives your filtered results of people who match or have similar skills or experience as you. You can even get job offers on LinkedIn. While setting up your LinkedIn resume, you don’t have to put too much on it. No one would be interested in knowing your home address or what’s your favourite colour or food. Make it precise and to the point to make it look professional. First impression is the last impression.

 

Moving on, I’ll talk about developing a social media strategy to promote or market your media project. Here are some important things to consider:

 

1. Do research about the topic of your production by using RSS feeds and hashtags to find out more about it. Hashtag search can easily be done on platforms like Instagram and Twitter so add many tags to your social media and use pre exisitng ones as well.
2. Use platforms such as Hootsuite and Flavors.me to interconnect all your social media.
3. Experiment with platforms such as Instagram, Soundcloud, Cowbird etc. that encourage creative expression and is full of creative people.
4. Discover your audience through social media and find out more about what they want.
5. Have basic knowledge about copyright and privacy.
6. Understand that there’s different strategies and platforms for different kinds of projects and audiences. Try to be unique and creative.

 

Now, I’ll discuss the social media strategy implemented for our digital story. Our film was a short documentary targeted mainly towards Chinese students in Australia and the ones who want to come here and we showed the troubles faced by them in regards to culture shock and communication etc. We have actually kept our social media strategy quite simple. Didn’t try too hard with it and didn’t go overboard. We developed a Facebook page for it. Made some posts teasing the arrival of the film and what it is about. The film was also uploaded to Youtube to increase the reach and finally to a Chinese video website called Tuduo. The reasons for this are as follows:

 

1. FB page because it was the most basic thing to do and easiest way to market yourself. Has a wide reach and we could easily invite more people to the page and tell our friends to do so as well and then share the video.
2. Youtube because again it is a global platform and easy to access. It is a video only website and integrates well with other social media when you want to embed your video.
3. Tuduo because our film is also targeted at Chinese students who want to come to Australia or Melbourne to be specific. FB and Youtube is banned over there so they use Tuduo a lot. We asked our Chinese friends to share the Tuduo link on their WeChat so that more people can see it.
4. The reason why we did not do much for our social media campaign is because, firstly it is for Chinese people, and they really don’t use social media that much because of the ban in their country. They’re just not used to platforms like Twitter or Instagram. We opted to go for the most obvious and usual ones like FB and Youtube instead.

 

I would also like to mention that a good social media strategy can give you instant recognition and fame and people will want more of you. One of the biggest examples of this is Justin Bieber. His mother would record him singing and dancing and upload the videos on YouTube. Her intention was to share them with friends and family however, Bieber got the attention of millions. This wasn’t exactly a strategy but Youtube gave him the platform.

As mentioned on Hootsuite blog on Film and social media: Blockbuster success and household name “Twilight” was the first film to reach 1 million followers on Twitter. Enticing fans to follow the film on social media is half the battle. After that, they have a massive captive audience to whom they can market, build hype and entertain with engaging content. But fans don’t follow films on Twitter to be bombarded with marketing campaigns. They want to be a part of a community and greater experience, where their favorite characters, producers and filmmakers are listening and engaging. Social media provides a space for communities of fans to connect over their shared love of film.

References:

https://blog.hootsuite.com/film-industry-social-media/

http://www.thetalko.com/15-people-who-became-rich-and-famous-thanks-to-social-media/

How Syfy Turns TV Shows Into Social Phenomenons

Syfy is a US based TV channel which features a large range of programming featuring pretty much everything from science fiction to paranormal to drama and even reality. It was known as Sci-Fi until 2009. It recently got revamped and new online content strategies were introduced to keep up with the viewers’ ever changing TV watching habits. Basically they’ve made their shows and promotions very much related to social media.

For some of the shows, for example Haven, there is a social story line along with the main one. Two of the main characters of that show are very active on Twitter engaging with the audience in their on screen persona which is one of the reasons that the show is one of the top trends on twitter regularly. Also, other popular shows like Ghost hunters have a very strong fan base on social media. For the show Face Off, there was actually a live audience voting for the first time ever which generated tremendous social participation. This was a genius strategy. You would always want the audience to get engaged in your show as much as possible. Syfy comes up with these ideas because of the bi-weekly meetings which have members from every department and they share their ideas.

Before the production for a show starts, the show’s creators and marketing teams sit down and focus on ideas that complement the show depending on the target audience and the genre and try to be as different as possible from the others. Pretty much every social platform is used depending on the type of show again. Surprisingly, there is no dedicated social team at Syfy. The job is split up between marketing and digital teams but everyone at the network is engaged with social because at the end of the day, it’s a team effort. The Syfy audience is called igniters, the people who are first to find and try out new things with high standards so Syfy has to be at the top of it’s game all the time when it comes to social.

In the end I would want to discuss the most important part. How is this article going to impact the way I approach my digital story? This article has made me realize that in today’s world, you have to keep up with ever changing viewing habits of the audience. Your content might be good, but if the audience doesn’t know about it or the first impression is not good, they will probably not care. Marketing and promotion of your product is the most important thing these days and it should be done in a creative way so that it grabs the attention of your target audience. If you do this, it is quite possible that even if your content is not that good, people will still watch it. The best way to get people engaged these days is social media. What I plan to do for my story is that, since it is targeted at Asian students, our group will promote it on Facebook, Twitter and WeChat (For Chinese people) mainly. It will start off with a twitter handle, facebook page and wechat page posting the teasers. One more thing I was thinking about that why not make  a twitter page for one of the main characters of my film. My film is about problems Asian students face when they come to Australia. This way my target audience will be able to relate to my content more.