According to a study conducted by Netpop Research, forty million Americans are now regularly milling around Social Networks; mostly on Facebook and MySpace. Why is that important for you? Because if you are an independent filmmaker, with a limited or no budget for marketing and distribution, then you better make use of these networks to reach your audience!
We all know that even with the biggest circle of “friends” you won’t necessarily be able to motivate enough of them to perform an action (like, go and see your movie at the local community college, or organise a screening themselves), but you definitely increase the chance that your promotional efforts in the free and interactive channels are fruitful.
It definitely pays off to download the report from Netpop (which is available for free until January 31, 2009 if you register at Netpop) and study it carefully if you are aiming to approach an audience in the US – it will give you a good idea of which social network to focus on to reach your specific audience for your film. (If you want to save time analyzing the data though, you can also wait till next month, when we go live and you can use the FilmTiki tool find the best social network to promote your project… your call!)
