What Movie Trailers Can Teach You About Social Media

Movie Trailers Social Media
Most movie experiences start with the trailer. Most content marketing begins with a social media share.

One of my routines during the week is to check out IMDB for the latest movie trailers. It’s one of my guilty pleasures to take a couple minutes to break away from the workday to see what’s coming up in the entertainment world.

We’ll save the analysis of whether this is a worthy way to spend my time for another post, but for now I want to focus on the art of creating movie trailers.

The Purpose of a Movie Trailer

I’ve always liked movies. I’m intrigued by the way everything works together to bring a story from someone’s imagination to the moving screen where actors can tell a story and entertain an audience. It’s incredible to me.

I used to like going to the movie theater, but over the last year I’ve been turned off by the experience. To go to a movie now costs a couple nearly $50 by the time you get popcorn and a couple of bottled waters. I can’t imagine what it’s like for an entire family.

And once you’re in the theater you’re crammed into small seats. The floor is sticky. The other people are loud and phones are going off all the time.

That’s not worth it to me so I wait to watch the movie at home now.

But back to those movie trailers.

Each week when I watch the trailers I get excited about the movie. I realize the job of the trailer is to sell the potential audience on the full movie. Most trailers do a great job, but over time I’ve come to realize that some trailers do a better job than others.

It starts with having a good movie to promote. If you have a good movie the trailer part is much easier. The movie basically sells itself.

But trailers also need to explain the story and create the idea that this movie is a can’t-miss proposition. Trailer editors have to accomplish this with just a short clip.

Trailers often giveaway a few key snippets from the movie. You get a little hint and it makes you want to see the full story.

It’s exactly like how businesses should use social media.

How to Effectively Use Social Media

Awhile ago I wrote about the Go Daddy social media strategy.

The idea was that Go Daddy used advertising to get people to visit their website. They built anticipation by giving just a hint of what the content was about, but made sure the hint was a good one with value by itself.

That’s how movie trailers work.

When you watch a trailer you get a hint to what the movie is about. But the trailer needs to be valuable on its own. It has to get you excited and make you feel like it was worth your time to watch the trailer for two minutes.

When creating social media updates it’s good to take one of the key items you’re giving away with your content like a blog post or video and use it as the line on your social media update.

I’ve been doing this in the last few weeks with my social media updates and it’s been working to increase clicks, which leads to more traffic, leads and customers.

I might share something like this:

Businesses can get more leads by partnering with complementary businesses to create webinars. Find out more here…

That will get some clicks. It gives the social media follower an idea of what the post is about and it gives them something valuable. They see that the content is good and they click through to see the rest.

Try it with some of your updates.

Think about Go Daddy and think about movie trailers.

The same concept works for social media updates.

Image: SPDP

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