BUILDING AN AUDIENCE FOR DOCUMENTARIES - LOS SOTOLEROS CASE STUDY - PART 3
Social Media Marketing Updates for February-April 2025 for Los Sotoleros
Welcome back to my series on the Building an Audience for my upcoming film, Los Sotoleros, where I walk you through how I’m building my audience for the film. In this series, I’ll break down what I find to be working well for me, what isn’t, and how I’m thinking about building the audience. Think of it as a learning experience as I go through the process of trying to build an audience myself.
If you missed the first previous posts in this series, the links to the first 2 posts are below.
This post will go over my results from February to April 2025, with a focus on my social media results.
OVERVIEW
I set a goal of posting at least 3 times per week, including 1 reel per week at a minimum. I also implemented a “Slow Sotol Secret” of the week to always give me something to post that I can continue.
Between late February and the end of April, I’ve hit that goal every week except for 2 (which I’m ok with – sometimes life gets busy).
I generally try to spend one-two days every 2 weeks creating the posts and scheduling so I don’t have to panic last minute or spend too much time every week on marketing. There’s so much else that needs to be done when producing films that right now I can’t spend too much time on the marketing. If I had a budget, this would be something I would hire out.
In March I also implemented some ads into my marketing mix to start growing my audience. Next post I’ll do a deeper breakdown of my ad strategy, but for now I’ll just say that it has been remarkably successful in growing my audience with a small budget (less than $150 so far).
Of course, the true measure of success for the ads won’t come until I see if it returns me an ROI in my crowdfunding campaign and/or revenue when I release the film, but I expect it will.
So, let’s see what has worked well and what hasn’t so far:
AD RESULTS
I ran 2 different ad campaigns over the course of the 2.5 months. The first was a general awareness/video thru plays campaign to start developing the audience and algorithm learning for my future campaigns, and the second was a campaign to gain Facebook likes/followers. As mentioned, I’ll go over the breakdown of my campaigns in a future article, but for now, here are the results and some brief conclusions of the results.
The like/follow campaign performed exceptionally well, leading to 435 page likes so far after reaching just 3549 people, for a CTR of 14.9% (anything above 10% is quite extraordinary).
The video thru play campaign I had started first and have now ended. I reached nearly 13000 people, with 3315 of those having watched over 50% of my :28 second reel. This cost me $.02 per thru play – a pretty affordable way to help train the algorithm on my audience and make more people aware of my film.
If you have any questions about my ads that you want me to answer in the next article, please let me know!
ORGANIC POST RESULTS
I made 34 posts and reels over the course of the 2.5 months. These organic posts reached 18 800 people on Facebook and just over 7000 people on Instagram.
Audience growth has been slow on Instagram as it requires people to act by themselves to follow your account. On Facebook, I have the advantage of both running an ad campaign to get followers and being able to manually invite people to follow the page. This has led to me adding 150 followers organically over the 2.5 months, in addition to the 435 I made through ads. This has made me thankful that I didn’t choose to ignore Facebook for my marketing, despite the constant topic going around that Facebook is dead (by the way I can’t wait to leave FB and IG for good… but that’s a story for another time).
A handful of posts really took off, relative to my audience size and surprisingly photos did just as well as reels in some cases.
As you can see, my top post of the time period was a selection of stills. Despite the relatively low engagement (only 6 likes and 7 shares) it reached a lot of people and had a decent amount of views.
This was my top performing reel. Even though it didn’t reach as many people as my highest post, it had much more interaction – 81 shares and 125 likes, along with 3 comments. If you count the likes and comments on the shares, it’s even higher (see below. Not sure why FB doesn’t add these into the previous results, but ohhh well).
My 10 lowest performing posts were all Instagram photos. In fact, some of the photos that did quite well on Facebook, including my 3rd most popular Facebook post, failed to make any kind of impact on Instagram. Part of it I’m sure is the difference in audience size (740 on Facebook compared to 74 on Instagram), but also the fact that Instagram really prioritizes video.
THE NEWSLETTER
In April I also started a mailing list for the film (you can opt-in here if you like!). As you probably know, I believe the future belongs to people who own their audience through a mailing list, rather than rent it from a social media following, so in the medium term I’m hoping to grow my Los Sotoleros mailing list.
So far I’ve done 2 posts with a call to action of join the mailing list, using a longer form video of my motivations behind making the film to entice people to join. Building the mailing list has been slow so far (with only one follower), but I hope it will grow as I make more exclusive content for the film and launch my crowdfunding campaign.
MOVING FORWARD
This month, as I move towards starting my crowdfunding campaign I’ll be focusing on the call-to-action of donating to my campaign. My crowdfunding campaign will last a month (May 15th-June 15th most likely) and I’ll be posting and sharing stories much more frequently for the month. My goal is to raise $12 500 for production and continue building my audience.
That’s it for now, stay tuned for further updates!