If Angela Davis Had Twitter, Way Back When…
Dr. Angela Davis reflects on how social media may have aided her activist pursuits in the 1960s. She is featured in The Black Power Mixtape, which airs this Thursday on Independent Lens. The clip is part of a larger interview conducted by PBS NEWSHOUR’s Hari Sreenivasan and produced by ITVS.
The documentary is the product of Swedish journalists, who came to the U.S. to document the anti-war and Black Power movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The film combines music, original 16mm footage, and contemporary audio interviews from leading African American artists, activists, musicians, and scholars.
100,000+ Fans Can’t Be Wrong
Interested in raising your web presence? This past week the Independent Lens Facebook page reached and passed the 100,00 fan milestone. IL’s Managing Editor Brooke Shelby Biggs has been making her social media best practices available in a series of BTB posts. You can find a roundup of those offerings below:
On Social Media, Quality Trumps Quantity
How to measure and maintain quality followers on social media.
Use Geo-Targeting Early and Often
How to geo-target relevant information to your Facebook community.
To Tweet or Not to Tweet?
How to setup and leverage your twitter account.
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On Social Media, Quality Trumps Quantity
Managing Editor of Independent Lens Brooke Shelby Biggs explains how to measure and maintain quality followers on social media.
When you’re just starting out in social media, your focus is going to be on garnering as many fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter as you can. There are tried-and-true ways of accomplishing this, the most effective being (assuming you have a small marketing budget) using Facebook advertising, openly asking fans to share your posts, retweeting others and asking them to retweet you, and holding contests.
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Use Geo-Targeting Early and Often
Managing Editor of Independent Lens Brooke Shelby Biggs offers advice on how to geo-target relevant information to your Facebook community.
If your film is screening in Chicago, how much sense does it make to just post that fact on your film’s Facebook fan page, where most of your fans are probably not from Chicago? Not much, for a couple of reasons.
First, as we know from a previous Being Social column, only about 25 percent of your fans will see any given post. That means only 25 percent of your fans in Chicago are likely to see your announcement. That’s not effective, and it looks pretty ham-fisted to your fans who live nowhere near Chicago.
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To Tweet or Not to Tweet?
Managing Editor of Independent Lens Brooke Shelby Biggs shares best tips on how to setup and leverage your twitter account.
So far in this series we’ve focused on Facebook strategies, and that’s because Facebook, when used optimally, has finer controls and options. But Twitter deserves your attention too, whether you are a station, a studio, or a producer.
Yes Twitter is more akin to a sledgehammer than to Facebook’s dull knife, but there is potential to engage a completely different group on Twitter and network with similar people, target particular interest groups, and even drum up buzz for promotions, premieres, funding initiatives, and plenty more.
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If You Facebook in the Forest Does it Make a Sound?
Managing Editor of Independent Lens Brooke Shelby Biggs offers advice on how to trigger and track engagement on Facebook.
A common misconception about Facebook is that however many friends or fans you have, they will all see each of your posts. This is simply not the case. In fact, only about one of every four of your posts will be seen by a given fan. And it isn’t because Facebook has some dark ploy to censor you, despite the viral rumors to that effect that surface every few months.
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Mastering the Facebook Fundamentals
By Brooke Shelby Biggs
Managing Editor of Independent Lens Brooke Shelby Biggs runs through some best practices on how to create and maintain an effective Facebook page.
One of the biggest mistakes people make with Facebook is presuming that their page (for a program or a station or a film) is basically an online brochure for the brand. In fact, your Facebook page is much, much more than that — it’s an information source, a conversation, a customer service center, and a content platform. Getting the most out of your Facebook page requires attention to detail, especially at the beginning. Here are a few basic rules when you’re starting out:
• Post enough, but not too much. Posting on a Facebook page is a delicate dance. You don’t want to be so quiet that people forget about you, but you don’t want to be such a blowhard that they tune you out (hide your posts from their newsfeed or “Unlike” you). Once or twice a day seems to be the sweet spot for new pages. Opinions and research differ on the optimal times of day to post, but it is common wisdom that you’ll do best if you space your posts out liberally.
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First Things First: Pick the Right Platform
By Brooke Shelby Biggs
We will be offering weekly tips for independent filmmakers and public media entities on getting the most out of social media. Visit BTB Thursdays for some good advice for your Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking strategies.
No matter if you are a filmmaker, a station, or a public media brand, the very first place to start is by creating (or switching to) a Facebook page. Note, I say page, and not group or profile. This is an absolutely crucial distinction.
A Facebook profile is designed to be the outward-facing real estate for an individual human being. In fact, brands that use profiles rather than pages are in violation of Facebook’s terms. While Facebook has not yet shut down brands using profiles, they have made clear that it is within their rights to do so, and it’s not worth the risk.
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Note to Independent Producers: Be More Social!
By Jonathan Archer
As part of ITVS Programming’s ongoing mission to serve the filmmaking community, Jonathan Archer has been seeking out filmmakers to provide their perspectives and experiences from the trenches. First up, The Weather Underground producer, Marc Smolowitz. He recently presented on a panel entitled The Power of Storytelling and was kind enough to share some of his thoughts and strategies with BTB.
Scene from The Power of Two by Marc Smolowitz
Last month, I presented at the Netsquared Meetup in San Francisco on “The Power Of Storytelling.” I decided to connect my remarks to two current labors of love — The Power Of Two — my feature documentary inspired by the life stories of twin double lung recipients; and The HIV Story Project — a new nonprofit that I co-founded in 2009.
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Celebrate Earth Day with a Social Screening of Garbage Dreams
The exclusive online screening will be held on Thursday, April 21 at 9PM EDT / 6PM PDT on Independent Lens’ Facebook Page and on Livestream.
Filmed over four years, the documentary goes inside the world of Egypt’s Zaballeen (Arabic for ‘garbage people’) to reveal the lives of two teenage boys born into the trash trade. For generations, the residents of Cairo have depended on the Zaballeen to collect their trash, paying them only a minimal amount for their garbage collection services.
These entrepreneurial garbage workers survive by recycling 80 percent of all the garbage they collect, creating what is arguably the world’s most efficient waste disposal system. Recycling to lift themselves out of poverty, the Zaballeen have, through necessity, devised ingenious solutions to one of the world’s most pressing problems.
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