Assignment #3- Hanshu Zhang

Evaluation of A Commercial Page

SOCIO 167

Hanshu Zhang

Oct. 29th 2013

Link to the Page: https://www.facebook.com/Thor

Evaluation:

Overall, the Facebook page for the Thor movie franchise is doing a good job of social media marketing. Since its inception on April 30th, 2010, the Facebook page has received more than 8.1 million “likes” over a steady flow of movie trailers, sneak peaks, promotion tour photos and contests.

In the still on-going promotion period for Thor: the Dark World (which started in April 2013), the Facebook page has offered at least four opportunities to win free things, three of which offer free trips to LA for the US premiere of the second Thor movie. The contests asked Facebook users to perform certain actions (such as to vote between the two main protagonists in the upcoming film, to nominate an acquaintance who can look up to the heroine as a role model) in order to enter the contests. One of the contests offered a chance to win free Loki T-shirts for those who tweeted content with the tag #freeloki on twitter. This is especially worth mentioning because it crosses the boundaries between two social media networks and uses one to increase the film’s presence in the other.

These contests are interactive in nature, thus soliciting the audiences’ participation. The Facebook page also offers more frequent interactive opportunities such as posting survey or trivia questions about the franchise. Another form of participation it provides is again cross- or pan-SNS interaction. For example the page posted a link that allows users to record a question for the main cast and director via Skype.

Facebook pages naturally allow users to leave comments beneath posts, so the opportunity for dialogue is abundant. However, the page also goes out of its way to create portals for customer feedback via posts that specifically asks for viewers’ opinions.

Apart from the interaction and feedback, the Thor Facebook page also regularly posts user-generated content such as cosplayers in Thor or Loki costumes at different comic-con events. However, given the nature of a public Facebook page, the user-generated contents are not freely uploaded, but are posted by the administrator of the page, thus to some degree preventing negative material getting to those who “like” the pages.

The page also interacts with associated Facebook pages such as the Iron Man movie franchise, the Avengers franchise, etc, establishing a Marvel echo chamber which can resonate and converge their influences and merge multiple groups of audiences together to help the box office performance of the movies.