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.

Once you’ve set up your page, you’ll need to create a cover photo--an 851 x 315 picture that sits at the top of the page. Your cover is anything  that can look good cropped into a long rectangle, but beyond that… what do you want your cover to be?  For you, it might be a still from your movie, or one of your photographs, or your paintings or a product.  If you don’t have anything original you’re going to have to create something and it has to be good as this is what will represent your business.  You need to take your time on this, and if necessary get a graphic designer to help you.  This is not a place to mess around with copyrights.  I am very knowledgeable about Fair Use, which I will write about later, but let me say that it is hard to verify what it is, but it is not hard to verify what it isn’t—if you are looking to make money out of an image you have to pay for it.  And I want to create an image that I can use later for everything.  Let me tell you why I think a stock photo company is essential.  I found my picture I use for my cover of the woman filmmaker on iStockphoto and decided she would be a good image for my brand. There are numerous pictures of her on iStockphoto and even a video, all of which might be useful at some point. More importantly, I was able to buy the lowest file size for $19 while knowing that more hi-def versions are available if I ever need them.   One of the reasons I buy from iStockphoto over other stock photo companies is that they allow you to pay for them in dollars, rather than in credits.  With all the others you have to buy a block of credits.  This makes sense for somebody who buys a lot of photos but it is a ripoff for us because we buy credits we don’t use.  If you want, you can still buy credits.However, there is one big negative to stock photography: anybody else can use it.  Getting your own art is always better.

There can be typography on your cover page, but it can’t include any mention of Facebook terms such as “Like” or “Share.”  There can’t be a Call to Action like “Get it Now” and it can’t have your website address.  Read more details on the Facebook Page Terms page.   It might suit you to change your cover from time to time.  If so, you are in luck because there is a brand new app called pagecovery  that lets you schedule cover changes at different intervals of the day, week or month.  It’s free now but I’m sure it won’t always be.

There is an application for creating cover photos, but I tried it and found it very hard to use, so I decided to create a template for you myself. If you right click and download the picture below, you’ll have an 815 x 315 image with a cutaway where the profile picture will be. Rename it “Facebook Cover Template.”

I’m not going to assume that you are all Photoshop users, so on this video I’m using a free online video editor called pixlr editor. There are a lot of programs that copy Photoshop and what they all have in common is that they aren’t as good and are much more difficult to use. A few are online like pixlr and there is a well-known open source download called Gimp. In this demo I will be doing things that take four steps in pixlr and would only have taken one in the consumer version of Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is what I use. Version 11 is coming out very soon so now is a bad time to buy.  I’ll let you know when it becomes available and at  that point you should do yourself a favor and spend the $60 and buy it and  make life easier for yourself. Once Elements 11 comes out I will do my demos in Photoshop Elements and if you want to do the same tasks in pixlr, Gimp, or another program, use the help files, although I can’t say for sure if you will be able to do it all.

The images I use in the demo video below come from creaTTor.com, which is an incredibly useful asset for free stock photos, textures and patterns (I used one of their free textures in my cover), illustrations, menus and buttons, Flash animations, and all kinds of stuff.  You should explore it as they are great material for Shareable Squares and you won’t have to worry about copyright.  The creaTTor.com stock photos come in sets that must be downloaded in their entirety.  The images I’m using come from their Cosplay set from Pixster.  

You’re going to want to run this video on YouTube so you can see it full screen.