Using Hashtags for Your Indie Film
There are about 500 million tweets sent each day, which comes out to approximately 200 billion tweets per year. Instagram users post more than 95 million photos and videos per day, or about 34 billion pieces of content per year. Add Snapchat, Facebook, Pinterest, and countless others and you have a lot of noise to cut through in order to get the word out about your indie film. The good news is that you have a huge potential audience. The bad news is that the vast majority of them don’t know (much less care) about your film.
It’s time to get smart about your hashtags.
Here are some of the most common film-related hashtags you’ll encounter on Twitter and Instagram (among dozens of others):
#indiefilm // #supportindiefilm // #filmmaking // #setlife // #filmmaker // #filmfestival
Incorporating these general hashtags into your posts and tweets will immediately focus your audience engagement efforts and help get your content in front of the best-fit audience groups which, hopefully, are also the ones that are most interested in your project.
I recommend using a single hashtag to represent your project across all social platforms. Usually, it will be some variation on your film title. If your title includes commonly used words or phrases, you can always add a qualifier such as “film” or “movie” at the end of the tag. For example, if your film title is #PIRANHACONDA, your hashtag writes itself. But, if your film title is, say, THE RED CHAIR, you might go with something like #RedChairFilm or #RedChairMovie. Hashtags aren’t case specific, but sometimes using both upper- and lower-case letters helps increase readability for your audience.
Now that you have your primary hashtag, you can begin expanding your potential audience reach by including additional hashtags that correspond to the specific phase of your production or release. If you’re crowdfunding, add #crowdfunding to your posts. If you’re in production, #setlife will come in handy. At a #filmfestival? I think you probably get the idea by now.
One of the most efficient ways to grow your online presence is through the effective use of hashtags. Hashtags aren’t magic, but they are useful, so find a few that make sense for you and put them to work.
