How Effective are Twitter and Facebook...Really?

Reid Rosefelt's calculations reveal Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites might be less effective than we have been led to believe. As a content provider, content producer, filmmaker, etc, I have seen first hand the near ineffectiveness of links, Facebook events invites, tweets, bulletins, etc., and besides our already close group of friends and collaborators (old college buddies and family members too), reaching out to brand new people, from my vantage point, has brought in very few brand new viewers, customers, attendees, or audience members. For example, I found that picking up the telephone and calling people in my address book was far more effective in getting butts into theatres, than anything I had tweeted, or posted. I have seen other filmmakers try to book screenings purely by the internet, or their blogs, or a facebook announcement, and come up nearly empty-handed. Sure your friends will come out and support you (sometimes), but how do you reach that "stranger"?

When I was in Idaho for the film festival, I did my own research and found that besides other filmmakers, the majority of the people in my 2nd, very crowded screening had simply read about it in the festival bulletin and thought it sounded interesting. No one had picked up my press cards, one sheets, or poster then went online to read about it. They read about it in the newspaper coverage of the festival and the festival line up publication itself. In fact, most of the marketing was our poster. In the film's Facebook Fan page, I even photo-documented the process of actual, potential audience members seeing our poster, then looking closer to read about the story, then making the decision to walk inside the theatre, pay the 8 bucks (or whatever it was) to see the movie. The two senior women (grandmothers, mind you) became my two favorite audience members and Q & A participators ever on the festival circuit. And according to them, they "dont really deal with computers a whole bunch."

Fact is, the internet may have "democratized" advertising for today's content creator, but traditional marketing still proves to be the tried and true method of reaching people and getting your message across (outside of the machine of a studio backed movie - ala' Paranormal Activity). This article really got me thinking. As Jay-Z says, "men lie, women lie, but numbers don't."

Here is some of this revealing article from Indiepix - after the jump:

Twittering Away At Life
Reid Rosefelt founded SPEED CINE to index on-line content. His site is speedcine.com.

"The first thing you learn when you go on Twitter is that nearly everyone on there is a Social Media Marketing Expert. I realize that being a Social Media Marketing Maven on Twitter is commensurate to writing that you savor long walks on the beach in your Match.com profile, but it got me thinking: if each one of these geniuses could generate a thousand dollars out of their social media skills, we are talking billions of dollars. And if there were ten thousand of them that were really savvy… that is trillions of dollars, my friends. That’s starting to look like some serious money. And it’s all from tweets.

Why are you reading this? My friends told me I would be insane to launch a business without taking advantage of this action. All I had to do was join Facebook and Twitter, learn about Digg and reddit and Delicious and StumbleUpon and I could sit back and people would link to my site in droves.

I probably spent over a thousand hours learning how to get the fullest use out of these things, and that doesn’t count the endless posting and tweeting. And these things were like heroin; they started to take over my life. I couldn’t look at a sunset without wanting to take a picture on my iPhone and post it to my FaceBook account. I would have serious anxiety about how many utter strangers I would allow to join my real friends on Facebook.

But I also used pre-social media skills, like writing a blog and sending out emails and press releases.

When I opened up SpeedCine a few weeks ago, I was very surprised when I looked at my analytics. There was no arguing with the facts. The links from my conventional marketing efforts were in the thousands; the links from Twitter were in the tens. For example, I wrote a blog post on John Hughes and posted a link on Twitter, and didn’t get a single retweet. But some people who got my email put a link to my post up on their blogs, which were seen by other bloggers until I got almost 4000 unique visitors in a single day."

Read the rest of this article HERE.