Today’s $38 a share – almost $1B US in valuation – Facebook IPO got me thinking once again about the platform’s relevance for indie filmmakers. Does maintaining a prominent presence on Facebook actually help or hinder the process of scoring audience traction for your movie? Does having a robust reputation on the Zuckerberg outpost really generate sufficient revenues for your film, either from DVD purchases or streaming downloads? Is it even worth continuing to invest effort and energy in trying to build up an audience for your productions there, given that the platform will now have a considerable percentage of public ownership?
I suppose the answers to these are beyond the purview of a blog dedicated to indie filmmakers and the craft of making movies viable and sellable, ad besides, it would get us into that niggling sticky wicket of, ew…business, an area of expertise which typically frightens the living daylights out of most indies I’ve spoken to.
Personally, I still find my Facebook community to be valuable for the type of work I do as PMD. Mind you, I’m a Producer of Marketing and Distribution, not a filmmaker these days, so I suppose were I to bombard my almost 4,500-Friend strong Wall with a continuous self-serving array of “please like me and my film and my actors and don’t forget to like…” messages, I could very well alienate most of my people.
There are indeed stimulating dialogues taking place at the ‘book, even if it’s mixed together with claptrap invitations to events I’ll never attend, with invitations extended by people I don’t know a thing about, to be in a room with other people who I’ve never met before. I’ve been a part of several of these since 2007 when I dove into the Facebook slipstream. I’ve often floated half-baked ideas to my Facebook following as a means of completing the “cooking process,” and occasionally I’ll get back some opinions which take me down alternative paths or cause me to think differently about some strategy I had in mind. There is some instant visible value to devoting all those hours to Facebook.
