Movie marketers get new Facebook tool

Facebook has given movie – and music, but let’s stay on topic – a pretty nice present. The social network has debuted Film on Facebook application that allows for the creation of promotional pages that can more easily feature and distribute content.

The new Flash-enabled application comes as Facebook has appointed someone in-house to explore more entertainment industry marketing opportunities.

As Josh Catone at Read/Write Web says, the new application is pretty obviously meant for smaller studios and filmmakers looking to get fans of their movies to engage with the page by making creation as easy as possible. Facebook is hoping its longer-lived application environment will be attractive to entertainment marketers and I think they’re right. This is taking a good amount of the barrier to entry that might have existed away and is likely to increase adoption at all levels, from amateur to studio-driven.

Also interesting is the analysis Josh did of the fans or friends of pages for two recent movies on Facebook versus MySpace. Here’s what he found:

Movie                   MySpace     Facebook
Sweeney Todd      77,017        13,186
Cloverfield             4,471            21,732

The reason I think this is interesting is that it probably betrays quite a bit about the audience for the two movies. Sweeney Todd is more popular with MySpace users while Cloverfied has more than five times as many fans on Facebook as it does on MySpace.

From this I would make the following broad assumption: MySpace’s more casual fans were drawn in by Johnny Depp, likely attracted by his popularity in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies. This speaks to a more mainstream-attuned user base there. But Facebook has the same sort of early-adopters that Cloverfield was looking to attract in a campaign that, until the last month or so, bypassed mainstream audiences.

Feel free to disagree, but I think that’s in line with how I felt about each movie’s campaigns.