What is social media doing for my independent film?

Sheri Candler is a digital marketing strategist and TFC’s social media advisor.

The question I hear the most out of filmmakers and others in the film community has to do with social media success. What is the point of posting to social media? What is reasonable to expect out of these daily efforts?

Though much of the guesswork is disappearing from social media when it comes to marketing, most filmmaking teams are not collecting and analyzing their own social media data in order to evaluate what is making an impact, why it is working and what they can stop doing either for the immediate future or stop all together. Without data or feedback on what’s happening on your social channels, you’re in the dark about what is and isn’t working in the day to day and whether your business goals will be successful in the long term.

We’ve never had this much access to information about what your audience is interested in, how they are responding to your work and what other media they are consuming. This data can help you make your work more relevant and interesting to the audience you are trying to reach and to instill stronger loyalty and engagement for the long term—rather than short-term “awareness” building and pushing for sales. Unfortunately, most in the film industry ignore this and prefer to run short term, expensive campaigns meant to build up a large looking following that will be abandoned once the next project comes along. Often what they do on social media does not even accomplish the sales goal, the main reason they are even running an account. What a waste of money and effort!

But how do you know if your social media efforts are working? You won’t if you don’t have a set of goals you are working toward and aren’t measuring the data that indicates whether you are on target to that goal on a weekly and monthly basis. Making data-driven decisions doesn’t replace creativity, but it can provide a direction and a way to know if your creativity is of interest to anyone.

Start with Goals

There are many stages that your social media efforts will go through when you are using it to build an audience for your work. I don’t really like to think of social media as a campaign effort because campaigns usually have a beginning and an end, but social media is 24-7-365 for years. It is really a business function that needs to be performed daily; just as sending email, making phone calls and having meetings are part of your daily, professional routine.

One of the first and ongoing goals is growth of your audience, or building a progressively bigger audience for your work. The purpose of setting this as a goal is to help you see how big of an audience you able to reach through social media. The follower number is usually public so it also lets sales agents, distributors, broadcasters and other potential audience know how much impact your film is making through social media.

Building up an authentic following is a slow process and requires patience, but it can be sped up by the use of a steady budget for paid promotion. On a weekly basis, you should be auditing each of your social media accounts to see how much your account has grown and match that to your efforts (how often you are posting, how much money has been spent to grow the audience, how many unfollows your account might experience). In Facebook, you will find this information under the INSIGHTS tab–>Likes. On Twitter, you will find this under the ANALYTICS tab–>Audiences. On Instagram, you will find this on your business profile page>symbol that looks like a bar graph.

To help you keep track, set up a Google Sheet or Excel sheet with columns that show New Followers, Old Followers, Change in Followers (use the Autosum function that subtracts new followers from the old ones), number of posts that week, amount of money spent on any follower growth campaign that you have conducted that week for each of your social media accounts. On another tab, enter in rows for each account (Facebook, Twitter, etc) and columns for each week in the year and fill in information on rate of growth and spend.

The next important goal to track is the Engagement on your accounts. These include Likes (or Reactions), Comments and Shares, and if applicable, video views, of the content you are posting. Twitter metrics would include favorites (hearts), @mentions and retweets. Instagram would include likes and comments. Pinterest will include repins and likes. Most of this information is available through the insights provided for free with your social media account. Some social media platforms have very limited insights, but this can change as more and more businesses demand analytics in order to continue using a platform for marketing. You should do a weekly report of the average number of likes, comments, shares per post your account is achieving and keep track of this on the same sheet as your follower numbers. Ideally, you want to see these numbers to slowly increase over time.

For a sample idea of what your spreadsheet could look like, see this link.

See this post about accessing analytics on the main social media platforms and what each metric means.

Since I post up to 20 times a day on the accounts I run, I do not compile and compute weekly and monthly reports manually because there is too much data to collect, calculate and analyze. I have been using this tool to keep track: https://www.truesocialmetrics.com/ In addition to telling me my Engagement metrics, it also helps guide when my best posting times are, which types of posts are my best and worst so I have guidance on what to continue to do and what needs to be changed, and who my most engaged followers are. For $30 per month, you can track up to 3 different accounts per platform so it is very affordable and this one tool brings in insights from all major social media platforms so I don’t have to visit each one individually in order to compile management reports.

A few words about Reach and Impressions

Typically, a publicity firm or social media agency will present their metric reports by leading with impression numbers on social media posts and media hits (for example, on a news story in a publication). These numbers are usually very high and thus, impressive to their client. But be aware, these numbers mainly deal with possibility, not actual success. I think of them largely as “squishy” metrics because they do not show real impact like a comment, a share or a “like” which means that a person actually saw and engaged with your post in some way. An impression number denotes the number of times a post from your account was displayed in the newsfeed of the social media platform, whether it is actually seen by your audience at that time or not. It shows that your content had the possibility of being seen. Reach, on the other, hand speaks to the number of people who actually viewed your content. A reach number is typically smaller than an impression number. Both of these stats provide a sense of how wide your posting is spreading, they just don’t give feedback on whether anyone cares.

Eventually, your goal should be Traffic. Traffic deals with sending your follower to another place on the internet where they will find out how to buy something.

In my work now, one of the biggest goals is traffic to our website. If you are in the distribution phase of your production, you should be tracking traffic too. How do you know if your social media is leading to sales if you aren’t tracking traffic? For most of you, the only kind of traffic you can truly track leads back to your own website because you have access to the analytics on your own site (for example, through Google Analytics). You won’t have access to traffic stats on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play, or theater websites etc., only the sales reports and those will not show you what tactics are driving your sales. So, it is important to have a mechanism for sales from your website. While there are several cool configurations in Google Analytics that can be set up, those who are not proficient in coding and setting up different tags, triggers, variables may just want to stick with using utm codes. To track traffic back to your website, you will have to use a utm code (universal tag manager) on each link you post to social. It is useless for you to put utm tags on URLs that lead to other websites if you don’t have a way to access their analytics to see traffic stats.

An easy to use one can be found here. In the first field, paste in the URL link you are planning to post. In the next field (labeled Source), name the platform you are posting this link to (your Facebook page, your Twitter account, a link in an email you are sending out etc). In the next field (labeled Medium), name the medium (i.e., social, email, banner ad etc). In the final field (labeled Campaign), put in an identifier for WHO is posting this link. Is this link being posted by the production? Then put in a short name that denotes this (for example, I use tfc for links that lead back to The Film Collaborative website if I am posting these links to The Film Collaborative social media accounts. I use sheri as the campaign name if I am posting links that lead back to The Film Collaborative website on my own social media accounts). If the link is being posted by a third party, such as an organization that has agreed to help promote your film, or the stars of your film who are posting this link on their own accounts, put in an identifying name so that you can differentiate between the traffic generated by the production’s efforts and those by third parties. When looking at Google Analytics, under Acquisition>Campaign you will be able to see what traffic to your website was generated by your social media efforts and what traffic came from each third party (provided that they keep the utm coded link intact, so tell them not to change any link that you send for them to post).

If you are particularly interested in knowing more about the basic functions of Google Analytics for your website, this is a good post to read and mostly still accurate.

Other useful metrics for your social media efforts

You can also glean information about the audience you are reaching through your social media insights. Through Facebook Ad Manager, you can see data based on interests, education levels, job titles and industries, other Facebook pages your audience follows, and the spending habits of your audience. This can help determine what kind of content you should be posting and what keyword parameters to use in paid promotion to help expand on the audience you have started to gather.

Paid promotion

By now, all of you should be aware that running accounts on the big social media platforms requires promotional spend. On Facebook, organic (unpaid) reach has plummeted to a meager 6%, meaning that for every 100 followers you have, only 6 of them are going to see your content. Also there are more than 3 million links shared every hour on Facebook so the chances of your followers seeing most of your posts in their newsfeed are very low. To make sure you are both growing your targeted audience base and reaching that audience with your updates, it will be important to spend on promoted posts. Since Facebook also owns Instagram, the same advice holds. If you aren’t using the paid promotion tools on Twitter, chances are great that your tweets will be lost in the stream and your following will grow very slowly.

Does this mean you can’t get any organic lift on your posts? No, that is possible on occasion, especially if one of your post gets a lot of shares, but if you are seeking to make an impact on a continued basis, you will have to pay to make sure your posts are reaching your followers in their newsfeed.

In a future post, I will cover the latest developments on the major social media platforms over the last year and what changes are coming soon. I will also discuss what platforms are useful for reaching certain audiences and the kind of content that should be optimized for success on the major platforms.

Sheri Candler January 12th, 2017

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Casting Your Independent Film

TFC commissioned this guest blog post by casting director Matthew Lessall, CSA because casting decisions have a big influence on distribution… and that we have never covered the subject before…

Matthew Lessall, CSA is a freelance casting director with credits that include the 2015 Cannes award winning film for best screenplay, “Chronic” (starring Time Roth) and the 2016 film “Miss Stevens” (starring SXSW best actress winner, Lily Rabe). Matthew is Co-President of the Casting Society of America. He is in the final stages of his “how-to guide”: “HOW TO CAST LOW BUDGET INDEPENDENT FILM – A guide for first time producers, directors and film makers.”

THE CASTING PROCESS

I think what is so unique about what I do, is that every film is different. The bones of what I do, how I do it, the pace, timing, knowledge, it is all part of the experiences I have had on previous work – but every job is different with different circumstances. Saying all of that, there are basic “actions” to tackle when casting.

Being ready to start can mean so many different things, but for the sake of pairing down what I do to basics, let’s assume that a film has a producer, line producer, attorney and director attached. Financing is in place (or at least some of it) and its now time to talk about casting. This is when I come on board.

The most important thing in my mind is that I have a firm grasp on story, characters, plot, tone and a mutual understanding about the direction the film makers want to take the film in. My number one casting philosophy is, “Everyone must be in the same film.” Meaning that all of the actors cast must feel like they are part of this universe being created. But possibly more importantly is that the crew needs to be on the same page. If the producer and director are not communicating well, if the costume designer or set designer, lighting, if everyone is not “on point” then you are going to have troubles.

From the start, what I do is flesh out who could be in the roles of the film. I create lists. I sit down and spend hours on each role trying to think about actors, the obvious ones who are box office draws, to the ones I have seen in theatre or film festivals, or met on a general a year or often years before. What I do is what I like to call, “casting director stalking,” following the careers (or the lack there of – because sometimes that’s where the gems are found) and cobble together the potential of what could make a great cast. This all takes time, because anyone can go on IMDBPro and make a list of actors, but a talented casting director gets into the mind of the writer, thinks about what an actor whom nobody else is thinking of could bring to a film and fights for those actors to illuminate the story in ways not thought of before. This concept may seem to contradict the, “everyone must be in the same film” philosophy, but if done correctly (it’s an art by the way—watch the HBO doc ‘Casting By’ and you will see what I mean) the casting process should elevate the script, enlighten the story, enhance the possibilities, and illuminate where there was no shine.

You have to remember we are talking about actors. Actors, the best ones, are artists, they are practicing a craft. When you watch great acting, you should feel transported. Your very state of being should be “out of body” you should not feel like you are watching, you should just be feeling. I know it sounds hippy-dippy, but that’s what I think I try to bring (under the best circumstances) to the job. I don’t hit it out of the park every time, it doesn’t always happen, but it was I strive to do – when I am given the freedom to do so.

Now that you have my philosophy, the basics are, I read the script, write a breakdown of all of the roles, write my own version of a synopses and log line (see if it matches what the writer has written) and then I consult with the director and producer. I bring the lists, I show my ideas, I send links of actors. I send the breakdown out to agents. I call the agents who I work with, I get the film covered by the agents. I think about who at every top agency has someone who may be right for the film. I discuss the budget with the agents so they know what the deals would look like. In general, I would say any film under $5 million dollars, the representatives have a good idea of what the standard fees and offers are going to look like. I then talk to my team and we start to figure out who we would make a direct offer to, who they would want to meet and I start auditions to introduce the director to actors and to give actors who want the chance to be seen (whom I think could be right for the role), a shot in front of the director.

Auditions are where a lot of creative work is done. It is often the first time the director has heard the words spoken out loud. It gives me a chance to see how the actors are responding to the script and to the director. And it shows me how the director communicates with the actors. I could write more on this topic, because this is a big deal: how the Director communicates – it can sometimes sabotage the casting process. But assuming everything is running smoothly, auditions are also where the characters as written can change from male to female, Caucasian to Latino, where can we see different types of actors who truly populate the world we are creating and/or reflect the world we live in.

I call the agents, set up the offers and deal points and confirm everything in writing, copy the production attorney and wait for an actor to accept the role. Once that happens, there is additional negotiation and additional deal points that need to be hammered out. Depending on various situations, I will do this work or the production attorney will take on closing the deal.

In general, anyone that is considered a scale player with no back-end or a day player, I will close that deal. Once a deal is closed, all of the paperwork is sent to production and they handle travel, housing, call times, etc…

ATTRACTING “NAME” TELENT AND HOW THIS EFFECTS DISTRIBUTION (AND CASTING GODS)

Many times I am asked to try to get a name actor into a film. This mostly has to do with the foreign distributors, because they feel more comfortable selling a film that has someone in it that they recognize. Every distributor is different, they all have different ideas and lists of who means something for their specific territory. In general, my rule is, if my Mother knows who the actor is then the distributor will be happy. It’s that simple and that lame all at the same time.

One thing I have seen time after time is that the more known names you have in your film the better chance you will have with distribution—this is true. This does not always correlate to creating a beautiful film. My second philosophy on casting is this: “Cast the best actor for the role.” You will always be happier doing this, it may mean more work from your producer or sales team to get the film in front of a distributor, but the film will be better for it and at the end of the day, that is what you want right? Not to sell out your integrity as a film maker? But so many do sell out—please travel to AFM, EMF or the Marche—where you will see film titles that make you wonder, “how is that film watchable?”

If you don’t have a ton of money to spend on an actor, then you better have a combination of the following to attract A-list talent: A director with an excellent festival history or some cool quotient like directing A-list music artists in music videos, or winning an Academy Award for a short film, or a writer/director with a script that wins a prestigious awards, like the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. A producer who has a great track record. An attorney who has worked on award winning low budget independent film. You should be able to show how amazing your cinematographer is. The vision of the film should be clear and presented in a look-book, on a website, with examples of how the film is to look. Any crew members with distinguished credits on their resume should be highlighted and touted. If you have an actor attached, who is that actor? Is your director or writer or producer represented by a major agency or manager – this can help a lot.

Try to remember that your film is not the only film that is being cast. You are competing with hundreds of films, television shows, theatre – all of them are trying to get the same 10 actors into their shows and getting an actor to read your script even with an offer (let alone getting the agent to read it) takes time. And if the casting situation is time sensitive, then you must have some combination of the above…or faith in your Casting Director to make a miracle happen.

As an example, last year, I cast a film called A POSTHUMOUS WOMAN. It was shot in Northern California and the budget for the film was under an Ultra-Low Agreement. I loved the script, and we had a well known, successful independent producer with known festival award winning credits to back up the film with a co-director/writing team that had never directed a feature film before. But the script was great, and Lena Olin’s manager liked it, so we made an offer to Lena Olin for the lead role. It took six months from the moment I offered her the role to the time she accepted the role. The only reason she even read the script is that her husband picked it up and read it randomly and told her that this was a role she had to play. I had faith that this material was going to connect with Lena Olin – I just prayed to the Casting Gods to make a miracle happen. And by the way, these are the only Gods I believe in, because let me tell you, they have come through multiple times in my career!

#iknowisoundcrazy – but it’s the truth.

There is a deep faith your casting director must have in the material in order to punch through getting A-list talent onto a low budget film. There is strategic consideration, strategic phone calls, placement of how to pitch the team, I try to make the film the coolest project ever – things like that that go into getting that talent to say yes and into getting the best cast possible.

SOME CASTING DOS & DON’TS

Do research who you want to cast your film. Look at films that you love, films that you think are similar to the one you are making and find out who cast that film. Reach out to that casting director and see if there is interest from them to cast the film. Just like actors, some casting directors will meet with you without an offer, some won’t.

Do trust your casting director: they are usually the ones who won’t bullshit you or sugar coat things. They are the ones who want this cast well too – it’s their name in the main titles – so it is in their best interest to make the best film possible.

Do have a strong opinion about actors. Know actors! If you don’t know actors, don’t poo-poo suggestions because they are not “The Ryans” (Gosling, Reynolds, Phillippe). If Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Rachel McAdams are on your list, you should probably have a back-up.

Do have a strong vision for your film. Answers like “yes” and “no” help us a lot. Casting Directors can work with “yes” and “no”, wishy-washy, not specific answers are not good. My high school acting teacher said it best, “God is in the details!”

Don’t show up late to auditions.

Don’t text during auditions. Pay attention to the actors!

Don’t ever ask how old an actor is while in the audition. You will be breaking State and Federal employment laws. Anything that you need that is personal background information on actors can be found out after the audition via the Casting Director speaking with the actor’s rep. And if you want to get to know an actor more, take them out to coffee after the audition to find out if this is the person you want to spend the next 3,4,5,6 weeks with.

IN CONCLUSION

Casting is about taste. It’s about knowing actors. It’s about connecting the written word to the spoken word by having a deep and meaningful understanding of the acting process and actors. Casting is about relationships. The relationships built with actors, agents, managers, producers, directors, etc… Casting well is about trusting in the process. Successful casting is not done in a vacuum. It takes a leader, a strong director with a vision, a producer who can execute that vision and great communication between all. Most of all, it should be the most rewarding part of the film making process.

Orly Ravid April 9th, 2016

Posted In: Uncategorized

New York Times Limits Film Reviews: A Response

After reading this article from the New York Times regarding a change in their film review policy, TFC staff would like to offer their take on the decision and whether it will affect many independent films.

photo credit: New York Times, New York via photopin (license)

Bryan Glick (Film Submissions & Theatrical Support):

Last year the New York Times reviewed over 900 movies! While the announcement did not say how many films they will/won’t review, it’s reasonable to assume that this will work to deter some of the gluttony of Oscar Qualifying Docs and what otherwise would be straight to digital genre fare.

These films rarely get positive reviews anyway and I would argue there are better ways for them to generate exposure.

The business most impacted by this are companies like Cinemaflix (Formerly Quadflix) that have been profiting immensely from Oscar Qualifying runs, in part, by guaranteeing a NYT review.

Because of the major advertising $$ the NYT still will review the majority of films opening and certainly just about anything from the top festivals.”

Sheri Candler (Social Network & Digital Marketing Advisor) :

I think this has been in the works for a while, starting with this Manohla Dargis Times article in 2014  There ARE too many films being made with no thought to who is going to know about them or view them.

Does a Times review, on its own, help a film’s financial success all that much? Probably not. A good review probably did help with getting other cinema bookings, though. It is also something the industry read and measured the worth of a film by, even if consumer interest in watching independent films in the cinema is waning.

Newspapers themselves are in a waning industry and staff cuts, especially in arts criticism, are inevitable…so I can understand that is just impossible for every film playing in a New York cinema to get a written review from a dwindling newspaper staff.

Ultimately, I believe people go to see a film based on what their friends and colleagues recommend, so it is time to consider how to reach a passionate audience directly, without having to rely on media entities to reach them for you. Word of mouth has always been stronger than a critic’s voice, so concentrate on making something that excites rather than mourning that a New York Times critic won’t help you.”

David Averbach (Creative Director and Director of Digital Distribution Initiatives):

These reviews have always served a dual purpose. On the one hand, they inform New Yorkers as to what is going on in the city in any given week. On the other hand, they are an arbiter of taste that will, for better or worse, live on in digital archives until the end of time.

It’s hard to imagine, however, that the New York Times would divest its influence in either of these arenas, which is why I think that for films that have something to say, things will probably stay the same.

If we see some attrition in the number of films released theatrically because of this, perhaps the NY Times will still be able to remain completely current while at the same time cutting the corners it needs to cut.

Jeffrey Winter (Co-Executive Director):

“Since last week, I’ve already had an actual experience regarding this.

On Thursday (the day the article was published), I met with members who were raising money for the standard DIY four-wall in NYC/LA and who were counting on a NY Times review to help the digital. Then I got home and found that article and showed it to them. They immediately decided they didn’t want to raise the money if they couldn’t get a NY Times review.

Of course we all know that these NYTimes reviews can’t make enough of a difference to make their digital work, but filmmakers have a hard time hearing that absolutely nothing is going to make their digital work because their film is too mediocre that nothing will make it stand out.

So I think this will discourage the admittedly tired DIY standard, and theaters that have come to rely on that revenue will lose some business.

But I agree with the New York Times’ decision. Most of those film had no business being in the NY Times anyway.”

Orly Ravid (Founder and Co-Executive Director):

“On the one hand, this suggests what we already know, which is that media and information dissemination and influence is increasingly decentralized, giving more voice to non-traditional speakers.

But, on the other hand, this puts a lot of pressure on one’s ability to captivate people without a centralized or very widely consumed platform.

A great New York Times review still makes a difference in ticket sales and digital distribution success (DVD, too, of course, for now). It also helps get financing. It’s a stamp of approval—it’s good for ego, yours and your investors’.

Will that ever change?

Only if the folks not relying on NYT because they cannot actually manage to influence audiences en masse some other way. There’s still the issue of stamp of approval—I think many in the industry and many audiences still want to rely on known critics—but it’s true that many of us see a film because someone we know personally and trust told us to.”

The times they are a-changin’.

Orly Ravid May 27th, 2015

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