Tag Archives: Facebook

Up Next From the Half the Sky Movement

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On March 4th, the Half the Sky Movement releases a wide-reaching Facebook game designed to inspire many.

The Half the Sky Movement is cutting across platforms to ignite the change needed to put an end to the oppression of women and girls worldwide, the defining issue of our time. Inspired by journalists Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s book of the same name, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide brings together video, websites, games, blogs and other educational tools to not only raise awareness of women’s issues, but to also provide concrete steps to fight these problems and empower women. Change is possible, and you can be part of the solution.

Last year, the movement released the documentary series as a special presentation of Independent Lens on PBS, making decisions along the way that would help the series reach a wider audience and bring awareness to the work of the nonprofits on the ground in 10 countries. This proved successful when the October broadcast garnered one billion mentions on social media – a true feat for a 4-hour long documentary on these sensitive issues. Continue reading →

If Angela Davis Had Twitter, Way Back When…

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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

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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

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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

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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?

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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?

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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

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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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Note to Independent Producers: Be More Social!

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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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