IFH 042: Social Media – 11 Ways to Use It to Sell Your Indie Film

Alex Ferrari 0:00
So in today's episode, I'm going to give you some tips on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Now, before I start on the on the tips, I want to kind of let you guys know that without social media, you really cannot market your films, you can't market yourself, you can't mark you can market your brand, your company or your film projects without social media and a very smart social media strategy. So if you don't educate yourselves on social media, and how to use Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Periscope, all the other kinds of formats, you will not succeed in the next 10 to 15 years or so trying to market your film, the world is changing dramatically in the days of not being on social media are gone. And now not just being on social media is enough. You really have to understand the platform you're on and have strategies to maximize that platform and learn how to drive traffic to your website, sell your products, sell your brand, and engage with your audience, which is part of crowdsourcing and building up that audience that hopefully will continue to sustain you as an artist going forward in your career. The things I talk about in the course Twitter hacks, is how I specifically got 10 up to 10,000. I'm almost at 12,000 right now, but over 10,000 Twitter followers in less than 10 weeks with doing it kind of part time, not even doing it like killing myself doing it all the time, doing it part time very easily. So I want to give you a couple little tips to kind of get you started. And then I'll give you a coupon code at the end of this to get a deal on Twitter hacks. So first things first, let's talk about Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, a couple tips. A lot of people talk about when to tweet and don't tweet too much because it's going to, you know, get people annoyed and so on. I'm here to tell you that you should tweet and tweet often tweet a lot, tweet every 15 minutes if you can. The reason why is Twitter unlike Facebook is a very fast social media platform, the Twitter feed is flying by and unless the person is specifically on twitter at the time that you tweet, they won't see it in their feed because they'll just fly right by unlike Facebook that kind of hangs around a little bit longer. Twitter is extremely fast paced. So if you just tweet once, you're wasting your time, because you're only going to get a very small amount of your audience that is following you. So you should tweet the same thing two, three times in the course of of a day or in a course of the couple, you know, 24 hours or 48 hours. So tweet often. And a lot of people like oh, you know, you might get a few people like Oh, you're tweeting too much. I'm like, you know what, this is about marketing. This is about getting your message out there. And I did a test to see how much I can tweet in one day. And I tweeted in one day, 45 tweets purposefully. And I wanted to see what would happen. Not one person said anything. And my followers went up, my traffic went up. Everything went up. And I was like, done. So tweet and tweet very, very often. Don't let any other social media guru tell you different. It works. And if you want to try it, try it yourself and see what happens when you do it. But it does does work. So always another quick tip. When you're writing your tweet, right somewhere in the tweet, please retweet it. It's about four times more likely for someone to retweet your tweet. If you write please retweet. It is something I don't know why, but it's a call to action and people love to you know to be, I don't say they love to be told what to do. But if you tell them like, hey, help me out, please retweet, they're more, they're more, they're four times more likely to retweet, then if you don't do it. Also, you know, you get 140 characters in a Twitter tweet, you should, all your tweets should be in a 120 to 130 range do not fully go all the way to 140. That's a mistake. I was doing that a lot a lot at the beginning. But now I've discovered that between 121 30 is the the sweet spot because that way, if somebody wants to retweet you, without quoting, you just want to throw something else on there, they have the space to do so. So that's very helpful. Also, hashtags. hashtags are really, really important when dealing with Twitter and tweets. But don't go crazy. 3123 hashtags per tweet is more than enough, don't go anymore, because if you do more, the retweets and the likes and the engagements go way down. So those are a few tips on Twitter. Now I'm going to jump over to Facebook, Facebook is obviously the Big Daddy, it is the the biggest social media platform on the planet has 2 billion users, it's something obscene like that. So I'm going to just give you a couple quick tips that I've learned during my journey with indie film, hustle, always use a picture, when you lay a post down in Facebook, a picture will with a link, obviously always with a link, but a picture with a link because pictures are what's going to sell your social media. Same thing goes with Twitter, if you can put a picture or have some sort of video or something visual, that's going to help your post out a lot. If you just put a text only post, you're not going to get a lot of engagement, you're not going to get a lot of reposts or shares or any of that kind of stuff. So that's tip one. Tip two, is about how to use Facebook marketing. Now, I know you guys have seen the little boost aspect of thing like you boost my post to boost this or that. A quick tip is that if you do a post, let's say to an article, or a trailer or something on your site, and you post it, instead of creating an ad, you should boost that post. Because when you boost that post, you are starting to get social proof meaning that you'll get all those likes and all those shares that you're getting will maintain. So every time you're going to do another ad campaign, don't start a fresh ad, just boost that post again, because now all of a sudden, something something a post that you did six months ago, and all of a sudden has 200 likes and you know, 300 shares, and all of a sudden when people see that they're like, Oh, this must be hot. So that builds that social proof, people like to go where the party's at, they don't want to be the first one at the party. And they don't want to be at the unpopular table, if you will. So you have to make your posts look bigger than they are. But this is a quick little tip on how to maintain that and grow that. So it looks a lot better than if you would have just started a new ad campaign. And finally, I'm going to go over to Instagram, Instagram is another big, big social media platform that Facebook purchased. And I'm also going to be coming out with a course on Instagram hacks coming out in the next few weeks as well. I am working on that as we speak because I was able to do the exact same thing generated over 10,000 followers on Instagram and Instagrams awesome, I love Instagram, it's so fast. So fast pace. And there's a couple little tricks I'll give you to the Instagram, first off post at least six to 10 times a day when you're starting out. I know that's a lot. But if you're trying to build up that Instagram following, that's going to help you out dramatically filling out your feed. So when people do come and start to follow you like Oh, he's really posting a lot or she's really posting a lot. And it's really fun and engaging content. And I go into a lot more detail about content creation, where to get content, how to create content, how to create branded content, and so on in the course that'll be coming out within a few weeks. And the other thing is another little quick tip on Instagram that people do not take advantage of is put a call to action in your description. People just go Hi, I'm Bob and I'm a filmmaker and here's my movie and thanks for coming by. That's not a description that's not going to help you because you can't put links on your posts in Instagram, the only place they can really click to get to your site is off of your bio. So create a call to action say hey check out this check out that check out my trailer check out this free piece of content that I'm going to give you check out 10 tips to how to do this or that or whatever that's going to help you use Instagram And leverage Instagram to get more traffic and more awareness to your brand. So I hope you liked my little quick introduction and some quick tips on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, which will help you dramatically Trust me, I have been doing this now for over three to four months, starting with my social media for indie, indie film, hustle. And I've been using it as basically a testing ground a testing lab, to see what works and what doesn't. And as I continue to find new techniques and things, I will be updating the courses accordingly. So even if you get it now, in six months, it'll be updated, all updated constantly. So I really want to kind of bring, you know, I'm doing a lot of this coursework because I'm being asked to do so a lot of the indie film hustle tribe has reached out to me and they like Alex, we want you to build courses, we want you to give us really detailed information about these specific topics. So I've heard you guys and now I'm doing it because you're asking me to. So I'm creating really concise, tight courses with a ton of information. You know, really great content that you're used to getting on indie film, hustle, and through this podcast. But I'm really just jamming in all this organization and these courses, and real inside tips on how I'm able to do what I do on indie film, hustle, and what I'll be doing with my projects and have done with my projects in the past and in the future. So I also have some little bit of a teasing exciting news, I have a project that I'm working on that I'm going to be announcing, hopefully, in the next coming weeks, and it's a big one, it's a real big one, it's not a course it's something else. So keep your eyes out or ears out for that announcement coming in the next few weeks. So I'm so glad that you guys are getting so much out of this podcast, and I can made it number one in so many different categories filmmaking, indie film, and so on. So thank you so so much, guys, thank you for spreading the word. If you're new to the indie film, hustle tribe, please spread the word reshare anything that you see on on our social media, if you see an article that you like, or podcast you'd like, please share it with your friends, spread the word, because I really want to get this information out there to the people who really need it to independent filmmakers who are struggling and are looking for answers that they may not be able to get anywhere else. And hopefully, indie film hustle can be that beacon for them. But enough about that, guys, I know what you guys really want, you want to know where you can get this coupon code to get a deal on Twitter hacks. So I'm going to be releasing it for $97. And it will be a living course. So we'll be updating it constantly throughout the coming years, as I discover new things for Twitter. So it's a lifetime access to this course. Now by the way, guys, it has taken me weeks to put this course together. And it's not something I just kind of threw together. There's a lot of knowledge in this. And I put a lot of love in this, I really wanted to make it help it help you guys out a lot. So I made it easy for you guys. All you have to do is go to Twitter hacks calm, that's Twitter hacks, COMM And the coupons already automatically in the link. So we'll take you right to the course. And you'll get the $97 course for 25 bucks, and they will be lasting for two weeks after the airing of this podcast. So hurry. So this is my gift to all the early adopters and early users of the course. So thank you very much. And I'm also going to do something else for you guys. I'm going to give away 10 copies of this course for free for the first 10 people who email me at Twitter hacks at indie film, hustle calm. That's Twitter hacks at indie film, hustle calm, the first 10 people who email me will get a free coupon code to get access to the course. So I would hurry because those 10 will go very very, very quickly. So thanks again guys so much for listening and being a part of the indie film hustle tribe. Don't forget to head over to filmmaking podcast calm to leave us an honest review. It really helps out the show a lot. So I also wanted to end this episode with a quote, because I think it was very appropriate for what we've been talking about. Content is fire and social media is the gasoline. Keep that hustle going keep that dream alive. And I'll talk to you soon.