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Andy’s Answers: How Cineplex improved their social strategy

Cineplex creates movie buzz through the help of influencers, location-based marketing, hashtags and user-generated content.

2 min read

By Andy Sernovitz 07/15/16

Social Media

How Cineplex improved their social strategy

SocialMedia.org

Most film studios push out social media content heavily until the release date of a movie. After the movie’s release, conversations die out and studios move on to the next upcoming release. But, as Justine Melman explains, in her presentation at SocialMedia.org’s Brands-Only Summit, she found fans continued to have conversations about movies right after watching them in theaters. Cineplex was missing an opportunity to engage with fans online.

As Executive Director of Digital Strategy at Cineplex, Justine and her team decided that they needed to capture fan conversations while they were still fresh. This brought on the launch of their strategy #FanScreen. Here are some key ideas from their strategy:

  • Call to create: To put the focus on the fans, Cineplex implemented “calls to create” so fans could develop user-generated content to be curated. These “calls to create” were unique questions or challenges given to fans that relate to popular films.
  • Get help from influencers: Cineplex worked with six influencers in-tune with movies and pop-culture. These influencers were the first to create user-generated content as examples for fans to follow and get the conversation started.
  • If you have physical locations, take advantage of them: Cineplex created a #FanScreen booth in movie theater lobbies to catch viewers right after watching a movie while it’s still fresh in their mind. The booth asked fans to select the movie they saw, and were prompted to choose either a photo or video and given a “call to create.” Once complete, the content was emailed to the fan and sent to Justine for use.
  • Hashtags can help you filter out the noise: Because there was so much data to filter through, the team implemented the use of two hashtags: #FanScreen and #[movie title], allowing them to filter all the #FanScreen data based on specific movies.

For more details, watch Justine’s full presentation or review her presentation slide deck here.

Andy Sernovitz builds organizations that help people help each other. His company, GasPedal, builds peer-to-peer communities for people leading meaningful change at the world’s biggest companies, including SocialMedia.org and SocialMedia.org Health. He wrote the best-selling book Word of Mouth Marketing that teaches you how to earn the respect and recommendation of your customers.