Digital Marketing Report: 2019 ELFF Facebook Campaign

Facebook Engagement Report: 2019 East Lansing Film Festival Robert Gracin

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TABLE OF CONTENTS I.

INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………..……….……….….……..3 Executive Summary Benefits of Social Media Use

II.

BENCHMARKING AND COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS………………………………..………..……5 Competitor Description Posting Patterns

III.

CLIENT ANALYSIS…………………………………………………………………………………………….….10 Priorities of ELFF Past Posting Patterns

IV.

PROPOSED STRATEGY……………………………………………………………….………………….…...11 Communication Messaging Strategy

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DEPLOYMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA……………………………………………….…………….………15 Posting Plan Content Examples Post Analysis Overall Results Assessments

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TEAM EFFORT…………………………………………………………………………………………..…………28 Collaboration Festival Participation

VII.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS…………………………………………………….…30

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INTRODUCTION Executive Summary Throughout September and October, our goal was to share information about the films featured in this year’s film festival. Research on effective social media use categorizes posts into two categories: informational and transformational, which were central to our content strategy. We consistently used a mix of both of these posting categories in order to get our page followers to come, stay and participate. Beginning at the end of September and through early October, transformational messages were mainly used with the goal of introducing our audience to the variety of films to be shown at the film festival. These transformational posts aimed to build excitement among page followers upon the weeks of the festival approaching and encouraged people to interact with the posts. As the date of the festival continued to near, our posts began to shift to more informational, and provided anything from movie trailers, articles about the movie, or stories about the director. During the festival, our strategy was the same, with the goal of directing users to daily screening schedules but not overwhelming them with too many posts. Finally, our strategy for the weeks after the festival was largely informational, highlighting best moments from the festival and encouraging users to share what their favorite moments and films were. Overall, the variety of our posts was determined by the needs of the festival’s communication for that specific week.

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Benefits of Social Media Use Social media marketing has many benefits and uses for reaching new audiences.

For ELFF, we began with analyzing the Facebook feeds of film festival competitors to determine effective uses for a festival of this caliber.

I.

Competitor and Client Analysis This project began with a thorough analysis of competitor festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival and SXSW, a cultural festival that takes place in Austin, Texas. Tracking the posting patterns and user engagements gave us insight into what the best posting patterns were. The Ann Arbor Film Festival Analysis informed our content strategy, as this event attracts similar attendees to a similar-sized event. Thus, using social media for promotional purposes gives the opportunity to craft a posting strategy informed by the successful uses of others.

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Measuring Reach and Engagement Facebook has a very advanced analytics platform, allowing us to effectively analyze which types of posts performed well in real time. Weekly evaluation of the previous week’s posts informed our decisions for content posting for the next week. Metrics such as the amount of Likes, Shares, and Comments that a post receives determines its overall success, and speak to how successful we are communicating with our audience. Ideally, this success online will mirror the attendance rates of the film festival itself.

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BENCHMARKING AND COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS I.

Choosing the Right Competitors We picked Ann Arbor Film Festival (Ann Arbor Film Festival, https://www.aafilmfest.org/) and SXSW Festival (South By SouthWest Conference and Festivals, https://www.sxsw.com/about/) as our competitor references. The reason why we picked these two as our competitors because we want to compare East Lansing Film Festival with both the local competitor and the industry-leading competitor.

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Introduction of the Competitors Ann Arbor Film Festival: The Ann Arbor Film Festival is the oldest avant-garde and experimental film festival in North America, founded by George Manupelli in 1963. Internationally recognized as a premiere forum for independent filmmakers and artists, each year's festival engages audiences with remarkable cinematic experiences. The six-day festival presents 40 programs with more than 180 films from over 20 countries of all lengths and genres, including experimental, animation, documentary, fiction, and performance-based works. (AAFF History & Mission, https://www.aafilmfest.org/history-mission,)

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SXSW Festival: Founded in 1987 in Austin, Texas, SXSW is best known for its conference and festivals that celebrate the convergence of the interactive, film, and music industries. An essential destination for global professionals, the event features sessions, showcases, screenings, exhibitions, and a variety of networking opportunities. SXSW proves that the most unexpected discoveries happen when diverse topics and people come together.

Throughout SXSW, experience 10 days of unparalleled discovery, learning, and networking with creatives across interactive, film, and music industries. The recent SXSW festival attracts around 15,000 to 20,000 people to attend each year.

(South By SouthWest Conference and Festivals, https://www.sxsw.com/about/)

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Competitor Benchmarking Analysis

Ann Arbor Film Festival: Official website: https://www.aafilmfest.org/ Official Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/AAFilmFest/ Facebook follows count: 11,107 (Counted at 12.1.2019) Facebook page likes count: 10,108 Average likes per post: 14.7 Average comments per post: 1.11 Average shares per post: 0.66

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Type of Messages The most commonly used message type was URL+ Image. The majority of posts were informational and brand awareness strategy was the most used strategy for AAFF. Other types of strategies were not very commonly used by AAFF.

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Figure 1: Ann Arbor Film Festival Facebook Post Analysis.

SXSW Festival: Official website: https://www.sxsw.com/ Official Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SXSWFestival/ Facebook follows count: 621,474 (Counted at 12.1.2019) Facebook page likes count: 602,412 Average likes per post: 233 Average comments per post: 35 Average shares per post: 55

Type of Messages The most used message type was URL+ Image, but other kinds like videos, images were also used frequently compare to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. About half of the posts were informational and the others were transformational. SXSW used brand awareness and engagement as the two most common strategies. Since SXSW is way more famous than AAFF, the share of engagement strategy is higher than its brand awareness strategy.

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Figure 2: SXSW Facebook Post Analysis.

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CLIENT ANALYSIS East Lansing Film Festival was founded in 1997 with the goal of bringing independent films to Mid-Michigan and foster the creative art of filmmaking in the region.

Every November, ELFF hosts a world-class film festival that showcases multiple films and attracts a wide audience. In addition, each winter, East Lansing Film Festival hosts the Lake Michigan Film Festival that awards cash prizes to films made in one of the four states that surround Lake Michigan. ELFF also prioritizes partnerships with local non-profit organizations to raise awareness and help fundraise.

One of the priorities emphasized by our client was gaining the involvement of college students and younger people. By utilizing a social media platform somewhat common among a younger demographic we hoped to draw in more engagement from college students.

Looking back through the ELFF Facebook page over the years has revealed an initial focus on informational posts with a transition more recently into transformational posts. Past years have shown an overall lack of engagement and interaction from the page followers. Realizing this helped create our plan to boost our posts to a larger audience and encourage engagement among the people attending the festival.

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PROPOSED STRATEGY Having a concrete strategy to start a social media campaign is perhaps the most important step in creating a successful campaign that increases the number of views, engagements, as well as growing a brand. East Lansing Film Festival was given two separate groups for Facebook. After discussing the benefits of merging together, in the third week we formed one single group to monitor and produce content. There were numerous benefits including more efficient communication between members and the professors, more consistency between posting scheduling as well as content, and overall more effectiveness in the quality of our tasks. Perhaps the most important benefit towards our strategy was efficient communication within the team.

Almost every aspect in communication would be made more difficult with split grouping such as our initial plan for class. Messages get misinterpreted, content would not be consistent between individual posts, and scheduling group meetings as well as the posts could be made more difficult. Facebook Group 1 had a member drop the class as well, which would have complicated the amount of work and time allocated. This prompted the discussion to merge the groups to make up for the difference in people as well as fix any communication errors. As Facebook Group 2 agreed that it would be advantageous to merge the two groups, we were able to create one larger, more efficient group.

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Our strategy was based off of both previous knowledge in social media campaigns as well as the analysis that we created near the start of the semester. Our coding and benchmarking scheme consisted of analyzing recent Facebook posts from two sample competitors: The Ann Arbor Film Festival and SXSW Film Festival. Through this analysis we were able to learn important information such as consistency of posting, optimal times to post, types of content, or whether to use informational or transformational messages and for what purpose.

Our content strategy for this campaign has been a mix of informational as well as transformational messages. This mix is necessary as the needs and goals of the campaign change over time. Transformational messages were commonly used at the start of the campaign as the goal was to build a social media presence, reach the online community, as well as introduce our audience to the future films that will be shown in the East Lansing Film Festival. As the semester and campaign went on, our content was becoming more and more informational as the goal of the campaign was to give people the information they needed to get into the festival for the films that they specifically wanted to see.

However, this was always mix of content and it is important not to just choose one style of message, as this creates a monotone presence and will not be effective in the entirety of the campaign. In summary, the message content we chose was created to adapt to the needs of the campaign and mainly the film festival.

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As for the content richness of these messages, the vast majority of our competitors were using a post image and URL to match it (see Figure 3 under “post image and URL”).

Figure 3.

Overall, this form of richness is one of the easiest to produce. Rich content such as video is often difficult as it takes more work than using previous images or images taken from external sources (such as websites, films, or articles). With the large amount of posts that we were tasked with creating, photo and text posts became one of our main forms of content. While this might have been the main form of content, other rich forms of content were still widely used in our campaign. Rich forms such as video from film trailers, East Lansing Film Festival YouTube videos, carousel images, and other forms of content. Often, trailers would be utilized, showcasing some of the content that will be offered during the film festival.

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Having a concrete strategy to start a social media campaign is perhaps the most important step in creating a successful campaign that increases the number of views, engagements, as well as growing a brand. Through our effective communication, content analysis of competitors, as well as our coding and benchmarking, we were able to produce a strategy that allowed us to be organized and effective in our social media campaign.

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DEPLOYMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA Posting Plan Our posting plan was split into three parts. The first part was pre-festival posts, the second part was posting the week before and during the festival, and the third part was post-festival posts. For the first part we decided on one post per day. We tried to schedule our posts between 1:00pm and 5:00 pm. According to our Facebook insights, most of our followers got online between 3:30 pm and 6:30 pm, so our posts would be among the first posts they see upon logging in to their account.

Figure 4. Daily Average Times Followers are Online

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For the second part of our posting plan we chose to post twice a day. We would post once around noon and once again approximately between 3:30 and 6:30. We wanted to ramp up posts a couple days prior to the festival to build anticipation for our opening night and the festival overall, and make sure we provided all the information people would need to attend.

Figure 5. Part 1 (left), Part 2 (middle), Part 3 (right) posts

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During the festival, we advertised the movies for that day and would bring attention to anything special happening, like if a director was attending the screening.

Following the festival, we thanked our attendees and volunteers for coming out and asked them questions, such as what their favorite movie was. We planned our posts like a rollercoaster. We slowly built anticipation the month before the festival, then increased the number of posts a couple days before and during the festival, before slowing down following the end of the festival. We thought this would be the best way to advertise the film festival without overloading our followers with too many posts.

Posting Content Strategy Our content strategy for our posts followed the come, stay, and participate ideas from our lectures. We advertised all the movies with transformational content like pictures and videos. We also included a link to the film festival page in almost every post and mentioned some of the VIP’s attending to raise awareness. To get followers to stay we tried to give the movies an enticing description and had some posts reminiscing about previous film festivals. To get followers to participate, we had multiple posts asking for volunteers and had several posts asking different questions, like what movie are they most excited for.

Even though most of the posts were transformational, we also added some informational posts about where the film festival was and what movies would be shown on what dates. It was incredibly important to let our followers know the dates because even though the film festival started on October 30th, no films were shown on October

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31st. We did our best to balance between informational and transformational posts and felt that we reached as many people as possible using varying types of posts and engagement strategies.

Content Examples (Pre-Festival) Date of Post: November 15th, 2019 Type of Post: Transformational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Thank volunteers and sponsors. Let them know they were appreciated Engagement Numbers:

237 Reached, 26 Engagements

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Date of Post: October 29th, 2019 Type of Post: Informational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Show off the great amenities of Studio C Engagement Numbers: 256 Reached, 13 Engagements (Boosted)

Date of Post: October 19th, 2019 Type of Post: Transformational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Reminisce about past Film Festivals in order to attract new customers Engagement Numbers: 205 Reached, 30 Engagements

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Date of Post: October 17th, 2019 Type of Post: Informational Type of Media Content: Text/URL Strategy: Get volunteers for the film festival Engagement Numbers: 159 Reached, 15 Engagements

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Content Examples (During Festival) Date of Post: November 7th, 2019 Type of Post: Transformational Type of Media Content: Text/Video Strategy:

This was the day of the film festival so we thought a preview would attract some customers for that night Engagement Numbers: 201 Reached, 7 Engagements Date of Post: November 5th, 2019 Type of Post: Informational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Let customers know the movie for the day Engagement Numbers: 245 Reached, 18 Engagements

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Date of Post: November 2nd, 2019 Type of Post: Informational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Let customers know Engel was coming to the film Engagement Numbers: 731 Reached, 20 Engagements (boosted)

Date of Post: October 30th, 2019 Type of Post: Informational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Give customers the list of movies for each day of the festival Engagement Numbers: 616 Reached, 43 Engagements

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Content Examples (Post Festival) Date of Post: November 15th, 2019 Type of Post: Transformational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Thank volunteers and sponsors. Let them know they were appreciated

Engagement Numbers: 237 Reached, 26 Engagements

Date of Post: November 13th, 2019 Type of Post: Transformational Type of Media Content: Text/Image Strategy: Engage with customers to reminisce and get feedback Engagement Numbers:

224 Reached, 9 Engagements

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Pre-Festival Analysis (October 1, 2019 – October 29, 2019) Our pre-festival posts got off to a rocky start. Both of our groups had just joined and we were working together to create our strategy for the festival. We made some missteps by not paying attention to what the constant contact auto-posts were about.

During the first week we had several posts with the same image grouped together. We learned from our mistakes and gained a lot of engagement from posts from October 12th through 16th. Even though our engagement numbers in the following posts go down, we believe that these posts were just as effective as the ones before. This is because we started posting multiple times a day, which spread our engagement numbers out and we started posting more informational posts which tends to result in less engagement.

Figure 6. Engagement levels for part 1 of our campaign

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Although our engagement levels seemed to peak during the middle of our campaign, the number of people we reached steadily grew throughout. We averaged 169 people reached per post and the graph below shows that some of our strongest posts were just prior to the festival starting which we believe represents the rising anticipation for the festival to start.

Figure 7. Reach for part 1 of our campaign

Festival Analysis (October 30, 2019 – November 7, 2019) Our posts during the festival started strong and tapered off towards the end. This was expected given that opening night is usually the most popular and the weekend was towards the beginning of the festival. Our posts did gather more engagement towards the end of festival as well, which was a bonus. Our opening night posts did well, and we were

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hoping to keep the momentum with our weekend posts, but they did taper off a bit which was disappointing. It is possible that we posted too many times over the weekend, and that is what caused all posts to have mediocre numbers.

Figure 8. Engagement levels for part 2 of our campaign In contrast, our reach during the festival weekend was phenomenal. With the help of two boosted posts we managed to reach over 600 people with three different posts. As with the engagement, the number of people reached tapered off towards the end, but this was expected given the start of a work week. All in all, we did extremely well with an average of 257 people reached per post.

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Figure 9. Reach for part 2 of our campaign

Overall Assessment of Results Overall, we did a good job of reaching our followers and raising awareness for the Film Festival. We struggled with the organization of some posts in the beginning, but we bounced back strong. Our numbers represent what we had hoped for in the beginning, which was to build anticipation, have a strong peak over several days, and then slowly wrap up. Our pre-festival trendline shows a gradual increase in people reached with some of our highest numbers occurring right before the start of the festival. Then during the festival, we carried momentum through the weekend with our best reach numbers of the whole campaign. Looking back, we were a little sloppy, but we were very effective when we needed to be.

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CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS In conclusion, social media marketing has become more competitive, and modern marketing trends are moving towards narrowing the focus towards better and more meaningful social channels. For now, it is important to focus on the social networks where the target groups are active. Recent marketing trends have forced messages on social platforms to be tailored and targeted to the target audience. All indicators show that Social Media Marketing Trends will go the way of focusing more on return on investment, new technologies, building trust, and strengthening the relationship between the brand and customers. Custom content can provide useful information relevant to your customers' interests. Based on that data, it can send more personalized and engaging content to customers. Social Media posts and messages can also be used to target customers personally. As we have seen with ELFF, the best way to keep up with social media marketing trends is to understand your audience, allocate the time and budget needed to harness new tools and techniques, focus on the most successful social channels, focus on building trust with users in all social campaigns, and reviewing the social media marketing strategy on a continuous basis and align it with modern marketing trends.

In the future, we recommend continued use of a cross-channel strategy. Promoted posts give the power to target users based on interests and age groups, so this might be an area to continue to invest in for years to come. Start by analyzing where your audience is active, which channels are yielding the best return, and remember that marketing trends are constantly changing, so it's best to review your strategy each year.

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References

Ann Arbor Film Festival. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2019, from https://www.aafilmfest.org/history-mission South By SouthWest Conference & Festival. (n.d.). Retrieved December 4, 2019, from https://www.sxsw.com/about/.

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