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.

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.

If You Facebook in the Forest Does it Make a Sound?
How to trigger and track engagement on Facebook.

Mastering the Facebook Fundamentals
How to create and maintain an effective Facebook page.

First Things First: Pick the Right Platform
How to get the most out of 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.

Estimates vary widely on what a “critical mass” of fans/followers constitutes: Some say a sweet spot of 2,500 Facebook fans begets a community that grows itself organically. A community of 200 Twitter followers will grow on its own, provided you maintain best practices in your Twitter activity. These numbers may be different depending on the size of your likely target audience.

Once you have a nice level of Facebook fans and Twitter followers, now what? Well, now you need to begin focusing on the quality of your social media audience. You may not be a retail business, but you still have a product to sell. You need brand awareness, you need positive sentiment, and you need conversions, be they tune-ins, station pledges, DVD sales, festival ticket sales, etc.

In short, the numbers you are after add up to engagement. Of your, say, 5,000 Facebook fans, how many regularly interact with the content you post? How many like, comment, or share? Tracking this data is how you can measure what is working and what isn’t. Here are some quick and easy tools to help you measure engagement.

1. Facebook Insights: Facebook’s own analytics tool is not as sophisticated as it ought to be, but it does the trick for rough overview. In the upper right column on your page you’ll see the Insights icon and link. When you click, you’ll get an overview of your page’s statistics for the previous month. The data under “interactions” is where the qualitative information lives. You can see how many impressions each of your posts received, as well as the engagement rate. Experiment with various types of post content (photos, video, questions) and different post times (morning, mid-day, evening) to find the most effective combinations.

2. AllFacebookStats: The free version of this analytics tool is handy in benchmarking your Facebook performance against similar brands. See how you measure up, and then borrow from competitors’ strategies that work.

3. Tweetmeme: Tweetmeme analytics monitors retweet data, tweet locations, referring domains, influential users, and user stats.

4. Klout: Klout uses Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to show you how you rate compared to others in your sphere, and is very useful in identifying your followers who are influencers, and therefore most likely to help make your content viral.

5. Hootsuite: Although I am personally opposed to scheduling social media posts and automated cross-posting to Twitter and Facebook, HootSuite has a robust analytics back-end that can be useful in pulling out instructive data on effective approaches and influential followers.

Do you have a social media analytics strategy that works for you? Share your wisdom with us in the comments, or on Facebook or Twitter.

Read Brooke’s previous entry on how to geo-target messages on updates on Facebook
Fan Independent Lens on Facebook
Follow Independent Lens on Twitter

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.

Targeting links and status updates

What you may not know is that you can geo-target your posts to specific geographical regions, which is handy for events such as screenings. Here’s how to do it:

1) Put your link to the event listing in the link field, and add a message about the event as you normally would.

2) Before you click on “Share,” notice the drop-down menu beside it that says “Everyone.” Bet you never noticed that before, right?

3) Select “Customize” from the menu.

4) You will be prompted to specify a country, and then specify a region or a city. (When you click the “city” radio button you may see instructions to “Enter a workplace or school.” Ignore this, it’s a bug on Facebook’s end, probably a future feature or abandoned feature)

5) If you are likely to draw audience from outside the specific city, include suburbs and neighboring cities.

6) It’s not required, but you could specify and language as well.

7) Select “Okay.” Now you’re ready to share!

Targeting Updates

You can also send geo-targeted messages, or “updates” to your fans. This is different than a post in a couple of ways. It won’t appear on your Facebook page, but rather will arrive in your fans’ Facebook in-box. And that’s EVERY fan in the geographical area you select (who has indicated their location on their profile).

You can also drill down even more finely, by targeting an age range or a gender.

While updates are an efficient way of contacting all of your fans in a given area at once, use them sparingly. A lot of updates can be irritating and spammy to some users.

OK here’s how you do it.

1) In the upper right of your page, click the “Edit Page” button

2)On the list of options in the left margin, select “Resources”

3) Under “Connect with people,” select “Send an update”

4) Now, click the box next to “Target this update”

5) Simply begin typing to choose the cities or region you want to target, as we did in the previous example. (Limiting the age range can be helpful for events where alcohol will be served, for example.)

6) Write a title likely to entice people to click to open it, and include a brief explanation of the content you are bringing to their attention and why. Don’t include links or HTML in these areas.

7) Below the body text field, you’ll see two links — “Record Video” and “Include link.” If applicable, include a link for more information, and consider doing a short webcam intro yourself. Personal video like this is extremely effective.

Now you’re ready to send your message.

Next time, we’ll look at some free and inexpensive tools to help you measure how effective your social media efforts are.

Read Brooke’s previous entry on how to setup and leverage your twitter account.

Follow Independent Lens on Twitter.

See Brooke’s tips in action and LIKE the Independent Lens Facebook page.

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.

First Steps

• Set up your Twitter account early on to build buzz and investment in your project.

• Keep your Twitter handle (i.e. @IndependentLens) as short as you can while still being effective as branding. It has to be all one word.

• Create a description of your project that makes you searchable to those who you want to connect with. Include keywords that people who would be interested in your information are likely to include in a search.

• Create a background image for your profile page with your logo or film imagery, plenty of descriptive information, and links to your website, Facebook page, etc. To change your background image select “Edit your profile” and then click the “design” tab.

• Now you’re ready to start following similar or related accounts. The best way to begin is to search for accounts that you would expect to find relevant. Follow @PBS, @kartemquin, @ITVSfans, @CAAM, @IndependentLens, @WGBH, @SwellCinema, etc. And look at their profiles and see who they follow. You might find some like-minded Tweeters on their lists.

Time to Tweet

• As you’re probably aware, Twitter allows you to post messages no longer than 140 characters. Packing information into that space can be tough. As Strunk & White advised, ”Omit needless words.”

• A good way to build goodwill and get on people’s radar is to retweet other people’s messages at least as often as you send your own. Find and participate in conversations on the topics your content relates to. Don’t only tweet about yourself.

• Use hashtags. A hashtag such as #pubmedia, #lgbt, or #egypt is a general keyword for the topic of the discussion, making it easier for people to find all of the recent tweets on that topic.

• Consider using an automated tool like HootSuite to schedule your tweets throughout the day and track your impact. But just checking your twitter profile for the times you are mentioned and retweeted will give you a good sense of whether your tweets are finding your audience.

• Include links in your tweets. Tweets with links are twice as likely to be retweeted.

• Use a link shortener. A tool such as bit.ly to shorten your links, so they don’t take up as much space in your 140 character limit.

• Tweet often. Twitter moves in real time, so your tweets don’t necessarily have a long shelf life. While it is almost impossible to tweet too much, if you tweet too little you can easily get lost in the Twitter surf.

We’ll get into more fine strategy next time. Meanwhile, get tweeting.

Read Brooke’s previous entry on how to track engagement levels on Facebook.

Follow Independent Lens on Twitter.

See Brooke’s tips in action and LIKE the Independent Lens Facebook page.

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.

Say you have 200 friends and are a fan of 40 pages. Even if each only updated or posted once a day, would you really be able to handle that many real-time updates? Your newsfeed would be moving to quickly to keep up with. To address that problem, Facebook came up with a somewhat mysterious algorithm called EdgeRank (similar to Google’s PageRank) that weighs the quality and variety of your posts and your past record of posting relevant content to deliver your post to a manageable number of your fans.

Maximizing your EdgeRank is an important part of a strategy to stay visible among your fans. A good post will attract interaction in the form of likes, comments, and shares (shares are weighted highest, followed by comments, and then likes). The more of those you get, the better the odds that that post and future posts will make it into a greater number of your fans’ newsfeeds. To that end, here are some quick tricks for boosting your EdgeRank:

• Ask Questions. Facebook is a two-way conversation. Ask your fans what their thoughts are. Be specific, and avoid open-ended questions like “What do you think?” Instead, ask something like, “If they made a documentary about your life, it would be called _____.” Questions appeal to people’s desire to be involved and heard, and it builds both goodwill and a sense of personal investment in your page and brand. Better yet, once a fan interacts with your page, they are more likely to see a greater percentage of your future posts.

• Mix it Up. Don’t just post links, and don’t just post status updates. Try posting photo albums, videos, polls, and questions. Photos in particular have high interaction potential. They don’t need to be high art. Behind-the-scenes on the set, candids of people who work at your station, funny signs or situations … all of these encourage interaction and also make you appear accessible and human.

• Interact. Like and comment on your fans’ posts. Be a part of the community and an audience for their content, too. This establishes what EdgeRank refers to as “affinity.” If you interact with a fan, Facebook presumes you have an active relationship with that person and that they are interested in your content and you in theirs.

• Keep it Fresh. Mostly, the key is to be consistent. If you neglect your page, then when you do get around to posting, very few of your fans will see your content in their newsfeed (remember, almost no one goes to your Facebook page directly after they’ve become your fan. 95 percent of Facebook activity is on a given user’s own newsfeed). Post reasonably often, because a post’s rank will degrade over time.

• Watch your stats and adjust accordingly. To see what is working and what isn’t, just experiment, and regularly check Facebook Insights (or a similar tool) to see how various posts fared. The higher the number of interactions, the better, but the really valuable number is “impressions” under the interactions heading. On the average page, that number is likely to be about 30 percent of your total number of fans. Consider yourself a rock star if you boost it and maintain an average over 50 percent.

Read Brooke’s previous entry on how to create and maintain an effective Facebook page.

See Brooke’s tips in action and LIKE the Independent Lens Facebook page.

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.

• Don’t post only about yourself. It is tempting to see your fan base as a rapt audience hanging on your every word. But remember that most people use Facebook to communicate with their friends and family, and being peppered with marketing messages in that space is disruptive and off-putting. If people are interested in your film or your station, they are probably interested in similar subjects as well. Posting what is interesting to you and related to your brand but not stark salesmanship, and you can quickly boost goodwill among your fan base. Consider yourself a curator with expertise in a few subjects related to your brand.

• Use the tools properly. You can do damage to your brand reputation by failing to use Facebook’s basic tools correctly and making yourself look careless or clueless. When posting a link to something, click the Link icon above the text field instead of just pasting the link into your status. Leave the status field for contextualizing your link for your fans.

Like this:

Not like this:

• Share and tag generously. When you’re starting out, be sure to “like” pages of related brands. For example, for Community Cinema, we “like” the pages of our national partners, non-profits, and community groups who help us with our free screening series. Once your page “likes” another, you can tag them in your posts by placing an “@” before their name in the text (Facebook will automatically narrow your liked pages to the ones it thinks you mean so you can select). Also, if you see news or links in your newsfeed you think your fan base would like, share the posts using the share button under the post to put it on your own wall. This breeds goodwill and a sense of cooperation, which makes it more likely those pages will share your content in kind.

Sharing:

Tagging:

• Be present. Facebook is a place to interact with your followers. Often they will ask questions, express a complaint, or deliver a compliment on your wall or in your comments. Respond! You don’t have to respond immediately, but you ought to respond consistently. Be of service, address concerns, answer questions, react to comments. The sense that there is a human being behind the page cultivates a sense of a personal investment in your brand. For this reason, unless you are a massive brand with 100,000 fans or more, I would caution against exclusively using auto-post tools such as HootSuite or activating cross-post features that automatically post your Tweets on your Facebook wall. These tend to seem impersonal and disengaged.

Next week: Did you know that your average fan only sees about 25 percent of your posts? Find out what you can do to improve your odds.

Read Brooke’s previous entry on how to pick the right social media platform.

See Brooke’s tips in action and LIKE the Independent Lens Facebook page.

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.

Facebook groups are designed to be a conversation space for people with a shared interest. While that sounds attractive for a film on a given topic, groups have earned a bad reputation because they tend to be spam magnets and overwhelm subscribers with messages. Also, groups cannot be tagged by pages or individuals, which greatly diminishes their chance to go viral or even show up in users’ newsfeeds.

Pages are designed for businesses and brands, and they are built to support their needs. Facebook greatly improved the functionality of pages in the past year, allowing much more opportunity to customize, geo-target, and message to fans.

When setting up your Facebook page, name it in a way that encourages tagging. That means keep it short and direct. For example, choose “The Godfather” as opposed to “The Godfather – The Film by Francis Ford Coppola”. Once you have created your page, get 25 of your friends to become friends as quickly as possible, so you can secure a URL that is short and intuitive (i.e. facebook.com/godfather).

Finally, be thoughtful about the image you use to represent your brand/film/station. Don’t try to jam too much information into it, but rather make it visual and straightforward with minimal text. If you have a logo, that’s a good place to start. Also be conscious of how Facebook crops this image for the icons beside your posts – make sure your identity survives in this small space.

Next week — fancy doo-dads you can add to your page to make it “sticky.”

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.

Both projects are anchored by social issue filmmaking and wrapped around by global calls-to-action that are uniquely tied to story and character. Produced concurrently in less than two years, my starting point on both has always been a creative one: “What are the stories I am trying to tell?” and “Who are the characters I am trying to bring to the screen?”

From there, a well-developed engagement campaign combined with a broad range of interactive, cross-platform components has fueled funding, capacity, and the ability to execute.

Marc Smolowitz

In fact, these projects — and the strategies that made them possible — have confirmed for me that there is no such thing as powerful storytelling without some or all of the following “non-story” strategies in the mix:

Infrastructure & Partnerships

Good storytelling strategy should include both online and offline community elements — and it’s the job of storytellers to build this sort of dual, effective infrastructure around projects from the start.

Two ways I do this is to include the creation of engaged advisory boards and robust partnership programs, with a focus on experts and nonprofits that are vested in my film’s call-to-action. More often than not, nonprofits find great value from aligning with separately branded media programs, especially as they face growing challenges around how to use media to engage their own stakeholders.

By designing partnership programs that offer real benefit to nonprofits, the storyteller will receive unexpected benefits in kind. Early on, the onus may be on the filmmaker to prove his or her commitment to prospective partners,  to make concessions, to work that much harder to win over trust.

Over time, the terrain of partnerships shifts into equitable, two-way relationships that fuel mutual benefit, funding, story, capacity, and more. See The Power of Two partnerships page and check out how we structure our program here, which currently involves 40+ nonprofit organizations actively connected to our cause.

Calendar & Events

Many documentaries are tied to social movements that come with powerful calendar opportunities that pre-exist us as producers. It is our job to connect to that calendar of events in meaningful ways that add value. For example, April was National Donate Life Month for organ donation awareness; therefore, on The Power of Two, we put tremendous amounts of energy into pushing out our own and collaborative April initiatives — see details about “The Daily Gift,” our 1^st of its kind organ donation iPad app, which features short-form video content recorded during the making of my film.

On The HIV Story Project, we expressly launched a new nonprofit focused on HIV and storytelling back in 2009 because we were mindful that 2011 would mark the 30^th anniversary of HIV/AIDS.

Events like anniversaries drive opportunities, marketing, partnerships, engagement, funding, and story. We knew that the HIV/AIDS communities would be hungry for good content in conjunction with the 30^th anniversary, and we’re now able to offer a range of compelling story telling programs to them, including: Generations HIV, an interactive video storytelling booth, and Still Around, an 82-minute compilation featuring 15 short films that can be repurposed in different settings across a range of distribution channels.

Social Media & Real-Time Engagement

While things are changing fast, in the second decade of the 21^st century there are essentially four types of content that can be published and shared easily via online and mobile channels — text, photo, audio, and video. Powerful storytellers are able to originate and aggregate all four with some amount of frequency, with the goal of always being in front of some segment of your audience.

Long before The HIV Story Project had a website, we had a very active presence on social media. We used monitoring, dashboards, and RSS aggregation to “appear” ubiquitous and engaged with our followers in real time. While it may be tough for independent filmmakers to be truly ubiquitous, social media done right can extend the sphere of influence of a powerful story in ways that create demand, awareness, change policy, etc.

On my projects, our social media protocol is simple: always emphasize the creation of original quality content (text, photo, audio, video), and when we’re unable to, focus heavily on aggregating quality content from our partners, trusted third party sources, and like-minded storytellers.

In this way, social media becomes a shared funnel of diverse storytelling, whereby all of our voices are amplified and our brand identities take on a life of their own.

Although it some times feels like it, none of this is rocket science. In fact, every day filmmakers and storytellers are figuring out ways to innovate on the above by placing their unique storytelling handprint on these tools.

In this age of shareability, the most important thing we can do is share our ideas. We’re all experts — and at the end of the day — there are no more secrets.

Marc Smolowitz is a director and producer based in San Francisco. His feature documentary producing credits include Trembling Before G-D and the Oscar-nominated The Weather Underground, which he brought to ITVS through the LINCS funding initiative. He currently teaches digital filmmaking at the Art Institute of California, San Francisco. Follow Marc on Twitter @marcsmolowitz.