Jan 263 min read

Connecting with Moviegoers: A Guide to Using Social Media Effectively

Background: An empty movie theatre auditorium. Text in black and white with shades of violet strokes surrounding the text. Hands operating a cell phone.

Global Community Engagement Day is on January 28th and OC is here to help you communicate with your virtual community! In this digital age, using social media to connect with moviegoers is a must in order to grow your business, stay on top of trends, and diversify your audience.

Check out our 5 tips on how to use social media to connect with moviegoers!

1. Why Use Social Media? Posting to social media may feel like a daunting task, but there are so many benefits! You can easily engage with your local community. Great posts generate earned media through sharing posts, hashtags, and word of mouth. As your social media presence grows, your business will solidify its brand identity and increase visibility, which builds trust with your followers. And, socials are a great way to better understand your customers and market to a new audience.

2. How do socials affect revenue?

The question on everyone’s mind: do socials affect the bottom line? Yes! Social media marketing is extremely cost-effective. You can create your content yourself -- you don’t need a fancy camera, paid actors, or fancy video editing software. Use your camera phone, your employees (if they’re comfortable being on-camera), and some social platforms allow you to edit your videos via their app.

Increased social media presence can lead to increased website traffic, which means more ticket sales. Be sure to have a link to your website in the bio of each of your social media accounts, so followers can find more information about your cinema (i.e. movie times, online ticket purchasing, and special events).

3. Each Platform is Unique

Each social media platform has its own characteristics including content format, user demographics, functionalities, and user experience. Your content should reflect this. It may feel overwhelming to create content for different platforms, but there is a lot of overlap. For example, video content does well on TikTok and Instagram via IG Reels, text content can be used for X (Twitter) and Threads, and photo content translates well between Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Start by posting consistently to one platform. Once you’ve mastered that platform, begin posting to a new platform.

4. Review Performance

Use analytics to gauge what content is resonating with your audience. Each social media platform has their own analytics algorithm for account owners to consider the best times of day to post, the content that receives the most engagement, and how to increase impressions.

Bonus: Is this vocabulary making your head spin? Which terms are most important?

Impressions, reach, and engagement are thrown around a lot when talking about social media account performance. All three are important to understand your account’s performance.

Impressions: The number of times your content is displayed. This doesn’t necessarily

mean it was viewed by the same number of users. This is the amount of times it was

sent to different feeds on a platform.

Reach: The amount of unique views of your content. Essentially, how many people

actually saw your content in their feed.

Engagement: Any interaction with your content. Ex. likes, comments, shares, saves, etc

5. Have Fun with Content!

Creating content can be fun and a great way to bond with your staff! Not sure what to post? Post content that is related to your business. Review relevant accounts and hashtags to get ideas for content. Track trends on each social media platform and post your own version. Ex. “We work at a movie theater, of course we love popcorn” trend on TikTok or a funny meme about a new movie.

Already have a social media presence? Start reviewing your account performance now and determine your strategy for 2024 to increase your visibility!