How important are social networks to producers and audiences as a form of film promotion?

How important are social networks to producers and audiences as a form of film promotion?

Social networks are very important to producers and audiences as a form of film promotion. For example the film ‘Avatar’ used twitter in order to spread awareness; they did this by including a digital copy of the official soundtrack for any user, who re-tweeted Avatar’s marketing materials. ITunes the music and video distribution service crashed when the trailer for Avatar released. Avatar day was promoted and people where encouraged to spread awareness of the film.

The material in section A from screen daily.com shows that audiences use social media a lot to get their information on latest films. For example YouTube was the favourite for viewing trailers and was an important link to official websites. This makes it more convenient for companies to spread awareness of their films; this is accomplished by putting links to their official websites in the description of their trailers so users can gain more information about them.

Another point made in section A states that Twitter has been seen as the best way to exchange gossip and get exclusive information. Going back to the example of Avatar where users were to spread awareness of the film by offering the soundtrack for free. It has been used to follow stars and filmmakers by fans. This is an advantage for companies as it means that if their stars have massive followings the information about their films gets spread more quickly and more effectively.

Facebook has been used to share information and engage with films in a more social way by spreading information using word of mouth, friends and family are able to communicate more conveniently and ask each other if they want to go see the film and organise using the site.

Section A states that those who use social media go to the cinema five more times more per year than the average filmgoer. This is an advantage for film producers as if they use these platforms for promotion they will be communicating with the most frequent filmgoers and so will be more likely to get people to come to see their films, improving their profits from the film.

Item 2 in part A states that it used to be that you had to go to the cinema in order to see film trailer for upcoming films but now film producers are taking to Facebook and twitter to debut their latest trailers. This is an advantage because it allows people to get information about the latest films at a much faster rate. Social media also allows independent projects to get noticed more easily, as groups of people online that those projects cater to can find them more easily.

Social media has the potential to cause marketing to go viral; this means that information about the film gets spread at a much faster rate and to a much wider audience than with regular marketing. For example in item 2 it states that for toy story 3, Disney and Pixar create fake toy adverts for Lot’s-o-huggin’ Bear, one of the new characters in the film, to make it look like the toy had really existed in the past.  This is an advantage because producers have no need to use other methods in getting users to spread awareness of the film as they will be more likely to want to spread it anyway.

Item 2 states that Facebook is a great way to connect with consumers. For movie studios, Facebook also offers a way to engage audiences. This is an advantage because producers can get feedback from people who are going to see their film that will provide them with an idea as to what they would like to see. Disney created a Facebook app for TRON: Legacy called the TRONiverse. The app is still active; it pulls in posts, videos and photos from various social networks, displaying them in an interactive grid. This is useful for producers as it draws information from social networks which encourage users to go see the film.

Not using social networks to promote a film can lead to very negative results for the producers, for example the film ‘John Carter’ lacked a decent social network marketing campaign which could have resulted in the producers at least breaking even. However because they did not use social networks they were unable to spread awareness more efficiently which hindered the films success.

Overall I think that social networks provide a very effective and efficient way of spreading awareness for a film, it is simple for the producers as they can use certain methods such as re-tweeting to spread awareness for them which can mean more effort could be put into other forms of the marketing campaign.