I had  breakfast recently with the charming Jaie LaPlante, Executive Director of the Miami International Film Festival.  Jaie has  healthy 13,000 fans on his Facebook page, but like most people, he’s hungry for more. 

I explained that he shouldn’t worry much too much about the  number of fans--the thing that matters is how active his page is--he should be concerned with the number of likes, comments and shares.    What was he  doing to stir up traffic?  Jaie said he had a guy named Igor Shteyrenberg who was merrily posting all day long.  “He shouldn’t posting so often,” I said, repeating a truism I’d rattled off so often in blogs and lectures.   “All Facebook research has proven that you should never post more than two or three times a day.” 

Umm….wrong.  Rules don’t apply when you have great content.

Despite--or maybe because of--the constant postings, I later discovered that Miami had one of the liveliest festival pages I’d ever seen.   Igor turned out to be the George Takei of movies, generating a potpourri of funny, interesting cinema and pop culture graphics he’d excavated from the web.  The page gave the festival a lively personality-- hip, and buoyant  and fun.   Adjusting the numbers proportionately for number of fans, the Miami page had much better metrics than the pages for all of the world’s top festivals.   Posting “too often” didn’t matter.

I was happy for Jaie, but the wonderful Miami page made me think of something  that I don’t like to think about:  my own page.   There was a lot of room for improvement there. The advice I give centers around creating square images—I call them Shareable Squares--that are funny and interesting and shareable.  Why couldn’t I put it into practice myself?    I worked hard on my Facebook- related graphics, but they weren’t all that exciting; movies are intrinsically more fun than social media advice.    There were people creating the square images and having luck with them, so I ran examples on my page, but I couldn’t rely on them to be a regular source of content.   I had been experimenting with offering different kinds of information on the page, but when I saw the Miami page, it kicked me in the ass--I knew I could do better.  

For the first time I asked myself the questions I ask every potential client: what’s your goal?  What do you want the page to do for you?    I decided there were three main reasons:  first, I write a blog and I want to announce the new posts;  second, I want to announce my lectures; and third, and most importantly,  I want the page to be a place to post examples of people putting my advice into action.  So I thought, “why don’t I make my own cinema-themed content to show people what I’m advising them to do?”    It would vividly illustrate my approach and at the same time give people a sense  of what I’m like.  

I did my first graphic on December 1st, a picture of Jean-Luc Godard:

People liked it, and so I made more: Christopher Walken, Marilyn Monroe,  Abbas Kiarostami, Louise Brooks, Quentin Tarantino,  Groucho Marx,  Meryl Streep, Bill Murray, Steven Spielberg, Michel Gondry, Woody Allen,  Bette Davis,  Audrey Hepburn, Pedro Almodovar,  Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando, Orson Welles, and Tim Burton.  

The activity on my page has gone up ten times.

There’s an important lesson here and it’s not limited to social media.  Don’t give up.   Keep trying until you find a solution that’s right for you.

The  HBO show “The Wire” went off the air in March of 2008 after five seasons. It never received hire ratings or an Emmy nomination, but many critics called it one of the greatest TV dramas of all time when it was on, and admiration for the program has increased exponentially over the years. 

HBO put up an official Facebook page in 2010 which currently has 1.7 million likes. This past Tuesday, December 4th they put up a picture Wendell Pierce as beloved Detective William “Bunk” Moreland  accompanied by the quote , and asking the fans to share their favorite Bunk quotes.

So far, 1505 people have commented, 13,129 liked the picture, and 1879 people shared it, for a total of 16,513 mentions on Facebook timelines.  Not all of the 16,513 timeline mentions are on unique pages but on the other hand if you scroll through the 1879 shares you’ll see hundreds of comments and shares from those. 

A good guess is that over 15,000 people put “The Wire” on their timelines in one way or another. 

As Facebook users have an average of 130 friends that would mean that a mention of “The Wire” appeared on around 1,950,000 timelines.   

Still, just because a Facebook user has a mention of “The Wire” on his or her timeline doesn’t mean they see it.   On average, only 16% of posts get seen, so only around 312,000 people probably saw it.

You heard me right—over 300,000 people saw a Facebook mention of a show that went off the air four and a half years ago, based on a single post by HBO.   Even if my calculations are inflated--and I don’t think they are--it is still in the hundreds of thousands.

These are big numbers, but what do they actually mean in the real world?  Personally I don’t care much if somebody likes some TV show on my timeline, particularly Facebook “friends” I might not even know. Although there will be some friends whose opinions I trust, with all the entertainment choices I have, I don’t know if a simple mention or even strong praise would be sufficient to convince me.  But it wouldn’t be about a single day.  It’s  a never-ending barrage of praise from friends that goes on for years, until this old show becomes linked in your mind with can’t-miss current series like “Homeland,”  “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad.”  

I admit that you would have to be a hermit not to hear about how great “The Wire” without any help from social media.   Still, we all hear about amazing movies and TV shows, but for one reason or another we never get around to checking them out.  Eventually our vague plans to see them slip to the back of our minds and disappears. 

As long as HBO keeps pumping out content, Facebook never ever lets you forget about “The Wire.” And this goes for kids who are five years old today.  They are going to hear about it again and again and again.  The only thing that will happen is that number of fans will grow as people watch the show and the numbers of mentions on Facebook will increase by the hundreds of thousands.

Facebook is forever.  Facebook is not about selling tickets this weekend or this month; Facebook is a long-term game which has a potential payout unprecedented in the history of marketing.

Or at least until there are TV’s or some kind of visual delivery system and climate change hasn’t killed us all. Even if Facebook is wiped out by some other social media platform, “The Wire” will live on there.

How much effort was put into that December 4th post?  It’s nothing more than a wallpaper photo recycled from long ago, accompanied with a line of text.  It probably took an HBO staffer a minute to put it up, before moving on to “Sex and the City” with its 13 million likes, “The Sopranos,” with its 2.4 million likes, “Game of Thrones,” with its 4.5 million likes, and “Deadwood” and all the rest.

You can say, well “The Wire” is a very special show, and that is certainly true.  But there are thousands of great shows in TV history that aren’t taking advantage of social media like HBO is.

There are a lot of great independent films too, but 80-90% of independent film distributors and filmmakers are totally, completely, utterly not doing what HBO is doing.  And I include marketing people who are on Facebook ten hours a day.  Once they put on their marketing hat on they use Facebook like the people who are most annoying on Facebook.  You know, the kind that never send you any fun links or make interesting comments about current events?  The kind that only contacts you when they want something, like for you to like their page or come to their concert or art show or….wait for it…tell your friends that their movie is opening in Cleveland or Birmingham or Tuscaloosa or Chicago or Tampa or Austin or San Francisco.  Did you tune out aftere first dozen playdates?  No problem. If you don't like, comment or share, the Facebook computer algorithm will stop showing them to you.

Can we do better than this in our industry? 

Hell, HBO doesn’t do Facebook that well either.

Postscript:  This post appeared first in Ted Hope’s blog “Truly Free Film” where it received the following comment from Miles Maker:

A beautiful and bigger example of what I'm experiencing with PARIAH (2011). Now nearly a year after it's theatrical release and 2 years after its world premiere at Sundance, the page has evolved into a community of like-minds on the subjects, themes and values of the film.

We've seen a lot of activity with more than 17,000 likes--none of them begged, borrowed or bought. We've grown them organically since the short film version of the feature.

A post made last week received 142 likes and has been shared 228 times, with similar likes and share numbers for other posts in the past month while we continue to gain Facebook likes. As new users like the page, we're undoubtedly driving repeat rentals, DVD and Blu-ray purchases and recommendations from fans & followers for this award-winning film.

Check out the “Pariah” Facebook page.  I know I will.

Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

I love Facebook but there is one thing that really irks me fierce, and that’s when a guy with a name like Axylsmpgo Phpnygusx “Big Pimpin” Pxtzchqo and a profile picture of Vera Farmiga likes my page. A guy who makes mysterious comments like like “axkcfierj;kfdjrpeirka;dfuernxitrh.” I suppose that there are those who get satisfaction out of correspondence of this nature, but alas, I am not one of them.

Please help me get these counterfeit likers off my fan page. All you need to do is give me a button so I can zap away the profiles of people who aren’t real. For example, if I have 1083 and one of those phantoms tries to make it 1084 I click and then I’m back to good old 1083 again. That would give me more satisfaction than you can imagine.

I’m sure you agree that these imaginary Facebook profiles pose real dangers to Facebook as a business. When advertisers shell out heavy coin to reach people who don’t exist… they can get annoyed. I bet Wall Street takes notice of stuff like this; I know I do every time I promote a post. : )  You must agree with me that this smells bad because otherwise you wouldn’t have started removing the buggers in January. But you persist in making me wait for the day when you’ll exterminate my personal infestation.

I’m as big a fan of Facebook as you could ever find, and I’d be the last one to complain, but seriously there is something kabluey in your system. I target ads to the United States, Canada and the UK and I get dozens of people from Morocco. Maybe it’s just me, but I seriously doubt that non-English speaking people in Marrakech are interested in my page. And don’t get me started about Iran and Algeria.

I block them. I report them to Facebook. I hide my page from countries. I target all my posts to people who speak English. But still these android profiles grow like kudzu on my page. Mark, when somebody wants to friend me on my personal page, you give me the right to confirm or not confirm. There is so little power I have in real life… people with b.o. and bad breath can sidle up to me at parties, so you have no idea how grateful I am for the confirm option that Facebook so kindly provides on my personal page. But when it comes to my business page I am as helpless as a kitten up a tree. This ability to control my own destiny is a basic human right, one that I humbly request that you grant me.

It wouldn’t have any impact on people who get joy out of having computer viruses as pals, but Mark, I’m the kind of guy who needs to have real relationships with people. After all, I am one of your 16 million subscribers. 

Sincerely,