Major Production Unit: Research - Marketing Grit: Social Media

To promote the film, Grit would have a presence on the social media sites Facebook and Twitter. This was a group decision made not just because it has been done before, but instead to allow regular updates on the production stages and to inform any followers of casting, screening and behind the scenes information also.

I searched online to look for other benefits of using social media and came across an article on Forbes' website:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/11/the-top-10-benefits-of-social-media-marketing/#3e6eec272a4d

A key point I found on this site was:

- "Every post you make on a social media platform is an opportunity for customers to convert."

This is accurate for Facebook: when someone you are friends with on the site likes a page or comments on it, you can see this on your main news feed and also interact with this. This creates a great opportunity for people, who we might not know or be friends with, to see the film's page via a friend of theirs interacting with it. Thus allowing exposure the spread across people's news feeds.

I continued my search but this time looking at social media marketing campaigns for films such as Birdman [Inarritu, 2014] and Ex Machina [Garland, 2015].

Here is Birdman's social media campaign:

Ex Machina's campaign:

One consistent theme throughout both campaigns are quotes from the films overlaying a still or a relevant image such as a cast member. There are enough pages in the script to potentially pick out key or memorable quotes from to create our own versions of these such as:

"I care about him just as much as you" - Zoe to Sean in Scene 10

"I understand you two are close, hopefully he's safe." - Archie to Sean in Scene 26

A still from those respective scenes coupled with the quote overlaying in the same font used for the titles could be a great way to promote the film and establish characters and plot prior to the audience seeing the film. A good time to begin this process would be for around 1-2 months prior to the film's release as a form of marketing with captions stating "4 weeks left" and releasing a new image once per week to begin a push towards the film's release.

Below are screenshots from the Facebook and Twitter pages for Grit:

Facebook page for Grit

Details about the film on Facebook.

Twitter page for Grit

Myself, our Producer, Editor and D.O.P invited people to the pages and shared them to spread them out as far as we could, we also encouraged the rest of our crew to do the same. As of this post Grit has 127 followers on Facebook and 16 on Twitter.

When first created, the Facebook page had a different cover photo:

This was taken from one of the test shoots our D.O.P did last term and was selected as a good placeholder due to the mystery of the person seated on the bench and that the location features in the film. This would be the cover photo until an official poster is created to replace and become a more suitable image (which shall be covered in a later post titled "Making The Posters").