How Movie Marketers Are Innovating On Facebook
June 21, 2011 by Kevin Michael Gray
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Early on in Facebook marketing history, movies had a minimal presence on the platform. Usually, film pages listed rudimentary information. Sometimes a marketer would create pages for individual characters in a movie, but that’s about as innovative as it got.
Since then, however, the platform has grown into an important tool for connecting with movie fans before and after a premiere.
“Now when we market on Facebook, it’s a full relationship with the fan group,” says Relativity Media president of marketing Terry Curtin. “If you think about the way that movie marketing has worked, for years and years and years we’ve had an indirect relationship with our audience. We sell our tickets through a third party, we advertise through a third party. So this is the first time that we have a direct interface.”
Movie studios use Facebook Pages to listen to movie fans, engage superfans who crave more information than can be crammed into trailers and spread the word about a movie in an organic way.
In the process, many have expanded well beyond a Facebook wall — they’re transformed Facebook into a movie-viewing experience for the fans who want that. Here are some examples of how the makers of a handful of recent and upcoming movies are using the platform.
In order to acquaint fans with the mythology that will be incorporated into Immortals, Relativity Media is creating a graphic novel. A "Become Immortal" section on Facebook allows fans to apply to have their images used for one male and one female character in the book.
"When you have a movie that has a mythology and the mythology is not already known," Curtin says. "It would be really expensive to orient the fan base to mythology through traditional means. So going to the fan base through Facebook allows us to give them a lot of early information."
