Facebook is a great networking tool, and it is free.
Start a Facebook fan page for your film. Invite everyone you meet while working on the film to become fans of your movie. Begin having conversations with these people about filmmaking, and the film itself. Whenever possible help others freely.
Become a fan or friend of all the people, organizations, businesses and clubs that you found while doing audience research.
Matt has a personal Facebook page. Although it is an interesting and useful page, he might want to start a fan page for Lucky Joe films. Today Matt has 207 Facebook friends. If Matt were to reach out to everyone in his potential audience he might easily have over 2000 Facebook friends.
(For additional tips, see “Getting Fans on Facebook” starting on page 88 of the book Inbound Marketing.)
Another way for artists, writers and filmmakers to promote their work is to write and give away an eBook. An eBook is just a relatively short document—30 to 50 pages—converted to PDF. Here is a good example of an eBook, Seth Godin’s ‘Flipping the Funnel’.
The trick to creating a good eBook is to make it remarkable. It should be truly useful and valuable to the people in your audience. You want people to read the eBook and say, “This is great!” and then forward the eBook link to three of their closest friends.
Here is how that might work for Matt. He might write an eBook containing things like maps of the trails, and reviews of places hikers can stop along the way to resupply and pick up mail. He might add his opinions of equipment he used, different hiking boots, and maybe a resources page with links to key organizations and blogs. He would then put this downloadable eBook on the home page of his website or blog.
Remember, the object is to encourage people to download and share the eBook freely so that word of your film spreads everywhere.
