This is topic Facebook Profiles for your theatres in forum Ground Level at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.


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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 12-15-2009, 06:07 AM:
 
I'm just curious to know if any other theatres have set up Facebook profiles as a way to network with customers.

I set one up for my theatre about two weeks before New Moon opened and we are up over 300 fans in that short time. I have a hunch the the Facebook fans are going to tend to be more effective contacts than the nearly 700 addresses our weekly email goes out to.

When I set up this FB page, we had just sold out the first auditorium for the New Moon midnight show (about about 6 weeks). Two or three days later we announced the addition of the second auditorium which we sold out in about 5 days. Then we announced the addition of the third auditorium and sold it out in just a day and a half. Considering sellouts are rare for my theatre, these are incredible numbers and I have to attribute much of it to the networking on Facebook. In addition, it allowed us to put out real time updates about individual shows that sold out over the opening weekend.

If anyone else is using FB for their theatre, I'm curious to hear your experiences.
 

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Posted by John Joseph Fink (Member # 3619) on 12-15-2009, 09:56 AM:
 
In Buffalo, NY Dipson Theatres has facebook fan pages for every theater they own.
 

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Posted by Sam Graham (Member # 2889) on 12-15-2009, 12:27 PM:
 
One of Brian's employees set up Facebook fan pages for the drive-in and the Cameo (separate pages). She posts showtimes on it and some pictures of special events like car shows or midnight show crowds.

The drive-in page has 1,292 fans. The Cameo page has 579.

Our e-mail showtimes list that I maintain (which covers all three properties) has about 3,800 subscribers.
 

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Posted by Michael Voiland (Member # 5386) on 12-15-2009, 03:47 PM:
 
Here is the place I work at. I think it does keep a business more in touch
http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Woodridge-IL/Hollywood-Blvd/29703201041?ref=ts
 

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Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 12-16-2009, 12:57 AM:
 
Here is the company that I work for as a Company Engineer .. babysitting 26 STRONG units.. - Monte
 

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Posted by Michael Voiland (Member # 5386) on 12-17-2009, 03:16 AM:
 
Very cool with the photo of the sound wall behind the digital setup.
 

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Posted by Dan Crittenden (Member # 5537) on 12-20-2009, 12:02 AM:
 
Here is my theater:
http://www.facebook.com/theuptown
It's not a fan page, it's a profile page, and has been up for quite a while now. 1,750 friends and counting
 

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Posted by Edward Havens (Member # 4715) on 12-20-2009, 01:44 PM:
 
I'm all ready to do a Facebook page for the Beverly Center Cinemas, but my bosses haven't given me the yet. We've got a big announcement for Tuesday... well, big for us... and I'd like some place to actually announce it.
 

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 12-20-2009, 03:36 PM:
 
If it helps push them, I heard the other day that Facebook has something like 350 million subscribers and roughly 50% of them log-in daily. There probably isn't a better way to "push" information to our target audience than through Facebook.

As an example, I just made a schedule change for this week - dropping Armored on Tuesday and holding Blind Side through Christmas Eve. I posted it on Facebook so now it's visible to all of our fans and any other users who view a fan's wall.
 

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Posted by Phil Blake (Member # 2012) on 12-21-2009, 07:27 AM:
 
I Set up a facebook page for my cinema , now have 300 friends I post the weekly program on it and i have noticed the amount of phone calls from people asking whats on has dropped , proves it does work , people are reading the page . I also post coming attractions special events etc .looking at the age of my "friends list" its not only teens but many mature people as well .
 

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Posted by Elise Brandt (Member # 5552) on 12-30-2009, 06:17 AM:
 
I did create a facebook page for our theater about something like a year and a half ago. For a small-town theater we have a whopping 653 fans (well it is whopping to me, don't laugh) and about a hundred hits per day. The page is connected to our web page as well, so people who stumble upon either one will find the other as well. When doing a little survey we found that a good 85% of our customers use the webpage instead or along paper advertisements.

The page is here: http://www.facebook.com/#/studio123
 

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Posted by Martin McCaffery (Member # 37) on 12-30-2009, 11:14 AM:
 
I set up a Facebook fan page for our theatre early this year. Over 1100 fans, which doesn't translate into attendance, alas.

I hate and loathe Facebook, so don't socially network on it, but do keep it updated as far as upcoming films and events. Maybe it brings in a few more people, but I can't tell.

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Montgomery-AL/Capri-Theatre/48664568996
 

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Posted by Scott Jentsch (Member # 1681) on 12-31-2009, 03:01 PM:
 
Do you think people go to the Facebook entry because you publicize it on your web site? Or do people find your Facebook entry from Facebook itself?

The reason I ask is that I am curious how many people are searching out things like this on Facebook and wouldn't find the theater otherwise, or if they stumble across the Facebook mention on the theater's web site and sign up as a Fan as a result.

I've had a few theater clients ask me about whether they should have a Facebook presence, and I tell them that it can be a way to reach a certain audience, but along with it comes a risk of splintering your audience and how you deliver your message to them, and it's another outlet that you have to constantly feed or it will whither and die, and actually be a negative form of publicity for them.
 

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Posted by Justin Hamaker (Member # 2165) on 12-31-2009, 04:14 PM:
 
Scott, I don't see FB as anything but a positive. It is a free avenue to quickly get your information out to people who are often your target audience. Plus it's a way to have two way communication.

I do think some people find us through the link on our web site, but I think the majority become fans after seeing our posts on a friend's wall or as a suggestion.

Yes, a FB page does create one more thing that has to be monitored and updated, but the updates only take a few minute a week and the info can often be cut and pasted from our web site. And it only takes a moment to monitor the page looking for questions or comments.

Contrasting a FB page with other forms of media, I don't see any significant down side.

We pay about $600 a month for a newspaper ad in a paper with dwindling circulation - if not for the unconnected seniors, we would drop the newspaper completely.

We have to pay for a web presence. Updating the site with movies, images, and other information can be quite time consuming. And that's saying nothing about the amount of time that goes into programming.

For our show times recording, we have to pay for 4 incoming lines and the recording has to be updated at least twice a week. I don't know about other people, but doing this recording becomes a major pain in the ass. Plus the recording winds up generating phone calls to the theatre from people who miss the information they want or can't be bothered to listen.

We have a customer service number which rings to the theatre. It can be a great way to communicate with customers, but it also winds up being an outlet for people who are too lazy check one of our other listings. We receive most calls on this line during rush periods when we can't even answer the calls.

We offer a weekly email newsletter email through our web site. The newsletter has about double the subscribers as our FB profile, but I have no way to know how many of those emails actually get seen and how many wind up in junk mail boxes. Creating the email is a piece of cake because I have everything auto generated after entering the date and picking a theatre (our company has two theatres).
 

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Posted by Elise Brandt (Member # 5552) on 01-01-2010, 05:20 AM:
 
Our facebook page started out as an experiment, separated from the actual web site of the theater. Then as we did a whole new website (the old one was ok, but done by a student, cheap and... well, old. Functioning, but we wanted a bit of an upgrade) the team building it was excited about the facebook page and thought it might make a good extra if connected to the website. Which it did.

The first year in existense it generated about a hundred fans, if that. The instant the new website was online and there was a link to the FB page the number of fans began climbing steadily, and has been doing so since. Which tells me there are regular customers on FB who just didn't know there was a page in there.

We have used the FB page for promoting events like Avatar opening (I check it daily, answer any questions and such. Takes all of ten minutes) and for little treats for fans, such as ticket give-outs. We said we'd give out five free tickets to random fans when the fan number reached 500. The fan number was around 470 then and I expected to see five hundred in the next week. It took less than a day so obviously there is value in FB, it's free, takes ten minutes a day and gets people noticing us. Even if there's one more customer a day that had the idea of going to the movies tonight because I hyped up Avatar the best I could, that's 300 euros a month that wouldn't be there otherwise. For virtually nothing.
 

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Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 01-01-2010, 01:16 PM:
 

quote: Justin Hamaker

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It is a free avenue to quickly get your information out to people who are often your target audience. Plus it's a way to have two way communication

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