The popularity of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus has simply compelled everyone to take these sites seriously. Considering the whopping amount of people present on these sites, even industries like Bollywood too has started wooing people over these social media sites for promoting its movies that churn out very Friday these days. If you check the marketing and promotion strategies of the upcoming movie of SRK – Happy New Year, all the lead actors have changed their names (SRK, Abhishek Bacchan, Boman Irani and Sonu Sood) over Twitter with the name of this movie unlike what Deepika has done for her recent past movie Finding Fanny.  Similarly, you can find a number of similar examples, which can has helped the movies in its promotion. Let us check the shift of Bollywood base towards social media.
Movie promotion and social media
With the popularity of Social media sites, the filmmakers have now started betting over the sites of Facebook and Twitter to attract the audience towards their movies. In fact, even these sites like Twitter have started calling Bollywood as one of the biggest segment, which rely on these sites to connect with their fans and carry out the backend supports for networking for different movies. For a number of multiplex operators including PVR, the movies promotion over the social media simply adds 4% towards theatre occupancies, which boost up the revenue up to 10 to 12 %.
Bollywood goes Social Media way
The Bollywood industry has gone a long way, right from trying the older methods of film promotions like hoardings and loudspeakers; it has entered into the social media age. Let us check the way the popular filmmakers have used these sites for their movie promotion.  Mahesh Bhatt had invested one million for his last movie Citylights on social media apart from investing 4.5 crore for other formats. Later he regretted for not investing more on the social media sites considering the amount of response he got for his movie promotion. According to Taran Adarsh, more and more filmmakers have started targeting the social media sites to promote their media considering the whopping amount of youngsters present on these sites. Salman Khan’s movie Jai Ho was the first one to use these sites to send out the official poster of this site to people tweeting on Khan’s account.
Why Social Media for Bollywood movies promotion?
Well, important question though, especially when you are keen to understand the relationship of B town with these sites. Well, these sites bring people very much closer to their hobbies and interests, which makes compulsory for Bollywood Bigwigs to use these sites mandatorily for their movies promotion. These sites help in creating the buzz about the movies that are being hitting in coming few weeks. The other reason why there is such a paradigm shift is that these sites help in connecting the fans craving to talk to their stars. As per experts, marketing any movie needs good amount of research work and if you are able to implement them the right way, the movies that has created its buzz over the social media sites can easily get audience via this method. Â Thus the ROI with these platforms simply go up considering the fact that these sites really require less amount of money for the movie promotion and marketing.
More money on social media promotion
With the wake of getting higher returns on investment by promoting movies over these platforms, more and more production houses are seen boosting up their budgets for their social media investment. Just one year before, the budgets for social media promotion, was around 10 percent the max, however, these days it has gone to around 25 percent. The fact is these sites are able to produce the right shoulder content for the online medium for their target audience in order to engage in.
Wrapping up
The user engagement over the social media platforms, which boost up to buy via the movie ticket booking portals can be easily tracked over the web landscape, unlike the way you can find out the number of people watching any movie after checking the TV or print ads. The multiplexes like the PVR too are seen putting forth their efforts in harnessing the might of social media just to attract people towards you.
