The 'New' Social Media, Part One: Letterboxd

Social media platforms evolve and new competitors emerge, and so the ones we choose to invest time in and the ways we use them should reflect that. In this two-part blog, our former Marketing Officer Sami Abdul-Razzak investigates some of the ways that film exhibitors have been using some of the ‘newer’ social media platforms which are particularly popular with younger audiences, such as Letterboxd and TikTok.

I’ve put ‘New’ in scare quotes in the title of this blog series out of fear that I’ll otherwise appear incredibly out of touch, considering that Letterboxd and TikTok were launched in 2013 & 2017 respectively (as you’ll soon discover, I am out of touch, so consider me more of an enthusiastic guide than a knowledgeable sage). But while these platforms are not exactly box-fresh, change often happens slowly. As far as I can see, the number of independent cinemas using them is still relatively small compared with the traditional favourites (Facebook, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and Instagram), and it’s still relatively early days for most of those that have started using them.

With that in mind, and considering that reaching younger audiences is a frequently-cited goal of many independent film exhibitors, I thought I’d lay out some of Letterboxd and TikTok’s unique features, consider how cinemas and film festivals might use them, and speak to some who have done so!

Young cinephiles and Letterboxd

Personally, I was a relatively early adopter of Letterboxd – my first diary entry being a 3-star review of The Turin Horse on 18 July 2015 (somewhat curiously I also added a love heart to the entry, 21 was clearly a complicated time for me). But it wasn’t until the COVID-19 pandemic that the platform began to enter the mainstream. The company didn’t employ any full-time staff before March 2020, and between then and February 2024 the user base grew from 1.8 million to 12 million (with the largest age bracket being 18-25). It began to be covered more regularly in the film press and there’s a commonly-held belief that once cinemas reopened, Letterboxd helped to encourage younger audiences back to cinemas, particularly to see repertory film.

In September 2020, Letterboxd launched a ‘HQ’ membership for organisations, and since then has implemented some new ways that cinemas and festivals can engage with audiences through the platform. So in this section, I’ll give a brief rundown of how those work and why you might consider creating an account for your venue.

Lists, who needs them? (Me)

So first of all, the basics. Letterboxd is a platform that allows users to:

• keep a diary of films they watch
• write reviews of films
• make lists of films
• prominently (!) display their four favourite films
• follow other users (to see what films they watch, read their reviews, look at their lists, scoff etc.)
• follow organisations (who have HQ accounts, more on those later)

There’s a separate section on the site for the Letterboxd Journal, an editorial platform produced by Letterboxd themselves, and they have their own social channels and newsletters (which have grown in prominence since the pandemic). Asking celebrities their Letterboxd Top 4 at press junkets/red carpets is now a common sight on our timelines (is this what they call a ‘meme’? No? Ok). Here are a few examples: Paul Dano & Adam Sandler, Wim Wenders & Koji Yakusho, the cast and crew of May December and Talking Heads. Maybe a series you could do with your staff? There, I just generated content for you. My accountant will be in touch.

The site also acts as a big database of the history of film. Want to see the highest-rated horror films from 1952? No problem. Want to find something under ninety minutes to watch on your preferred streaming service? Easy peasy. You can also search lists that other users have made. I’ve found this both useful when programming my own film seasons (both imagined and real) and when exploring the history of cinema (I’ve used Letterboxd lists of the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time polls to keep track of which I’ve seen).

List makers come in many guises, from the ‘Efficient Brutalist’ (Good Films, 90 Minutes or Less) to the ‘Descriptive Melancholic’ (lonely people in neon cities) to the ‘Should we be concerned about them? No, it’s probably ok’ (Psychosexual dramas, nihilistic fever dreams & surrealism with a touch of humour). Recently, Slow Film Festival programmer and filmmaker Edward Smyth has been making lists of a huge number of past BFI Southbank season programmes (dating all the way back to the 1950s) – Edward falls under the ‘Cultural Philanthrope’.

Letterboxd has long displayed where films you want to watch are currently streaming, but more recently they’ve incorporated a showtimes feature that shows cinema screenings near you, which should have the potential to benefit venues – particularly those regularly screening repertory films that Letterboxd users might be keen to see in the cinema (for example, writing from central London on 30 July 2024, I can see that Werckmeister Harmonies is screening at both BFI Southbank and Curzon Bloomsbury this weekend). The platform is powered by Assemble, so I think it’s probably worth doing as much as you can to make sure all your screenings are being pulled through.

Getting organised

HQ accounts are for organisations. These can be acquired via an annual fee, and I believe there is a discount for non-profit organisations. As well as most of the regular features, HQ accounts can also:

• produce ‘stories’ (essentially articles which display on their homepage)
• link to their team member’s personal profiles
• highlight other users’ reviews on their profile
• add a custom backdrop to their page
• pin a list to their page
• see analytics data

If you’d like some inspiration, you can see a list of organisations with HQ accounts here (a list that now includes the ICO, follow us!). This list includes Cinema Rediscovered, who have been using Letterboxd for the last two years of the festival. So for this section of the blog, I spoke with Steph Read and Nathan Hardie about how they’ve used it and what’s worked best for them (note, if you’re not so familiar with the platform, I’d recommend having a quick look around the Cinema Rediscovered Letterboxd profile before diving into the interview).

Nathan Hardie:

Primarily, I’ve used Letterboxd for Cinema Rediscovered to publish stories. The only list we created was one for the full festival programme. Having ‘cineredis24’ as a tag was useful for content (for example, to find Letterboxd reviews from the festival which we could share on other social media), but you can only see ones used by Letterboxd friends or those who wrote it in the review, which meant going to the film and sorting reviews by date, which was quite time-consuming.

Posting stories meant sharing our announcements and articles that critics had written (a story can be in the form of an article hosted on Letterboxd, or a link to an external site). This led to more content on social media (for example, shares by the writer and us), plus having a localised area dedicated solely to Cinema Rediscovered content (rather than on the Watershed website amongst everything else).

Without having a website blog, this was a way we could support writers and continue promoting Cinema Rediscovered. Platforming these writers builds a community among the Other Ways of Seeing commissioned film critics and friends of the festival, which resulted in a meet-up during the festival.

Sami Abdul-Razzak (SAR): Thank you Nathan. Steph, which features do you focus most of your energies on?

Steph Read (SR): Predominantly stories, because as Nathan said above, it feels like there’s a limit to the engagement and usefulness of the lists (at least in how they currently function on the platform). Whereas on the stories front we’ve found it really useful to use as a kind of central hub for editorial content related to the festival which is quite hard to spotlight in the same way on Watershed’s own website, given the noise from the regular public programme, news from the Pervasive Media Studio, and all our other activity.

SAR: Have you seen audiences find the festival through your Letterboxd?

SR: This is quite an anecdotal answer, because as we’ll cover later it’s currently quite hard to get any analytics on the performance of your HQ page, but we both agree that we’re sceptical as to whether it’s raised awareness of the festival to people who don’t know already know it/attend, but that for our audience members who are engaged and active (especially online) it’s served as a great platform to gather their enthusiasm, feedback and thoughts on the films and bring that into a kind of centralised space, if that makes sense. So it’s more us finding our existing audience in an online space and creating a place for deepened engagement with the programme (through stories) and a sense of them being in dialogue with each other and the festival through reviews and comments.

Anecdotally I would say our followers and audience we see engaging with the festival HQ on Letterboxd are either in the cinephile category or they’re young (like sub-35) – not to say those are mutually exclusive! – but meaning we have some younger followers who only appear to be vaguely/semi-interested in film, but practically no one over the age of 40 who only has a passing interest – the older users all seem to fall firmly in the cinephile category. Again, with little by way of analytics, this is drawing on us knowing who the majority of the followers already are.

SAR: In your experience, do you think Letterboxd is helping to encourage interest in repertory film (and watching it in the cinema) in young people?

SR: We’ve seen a really engaged young audience interacting with our Letterboxd (and the festival) and yes we think the platform itself does a lot to encourage that interest in repertory film and film history, in a way that resonates with young people – whether that’s through their use of socials, e.g. the infamous ‘top 4 films’ IG reels, or their monthly ‘Shelf Life’ mailer which is also published on their journal (for example, this month’s Summer of Sleaze write-up). There’s also something to be said for the quasi-gamification they’ve brought to film watching, with the sense of building a ‘digital collection’ through watching films and adding diary entries, which in some cases I think unhelpfully encourages a kind of obsessive, addictive collecting behaviour, with that kind of ‘gotta catch them all’ approach (but perhaps that’s more my own personal take!), and sense of completionism to ‘best film’ lists and so on.

SAR: Yes agreed. In fact, you are speaking to a tragic victim of this kind of obsession… Do you have any tips for people thinking about starting or growing their own account?

SR: I think frankly it’s only worthwhile if you have or can make some content to use on it, thinking particularly about the stories. I think there’s a limit to the impact you can have purely through, say, lists of your programme, and it does require a bit of commitment in terms of time, like editing the articles for the stories and monitoring audience watches.

SAR: Do you have any plans for things you’d like to try in the future on the platform?

SR: Not technically the festival, but we’re looking to start up a Watershed one which could then provide some interesting opportunities for interacting with the CR account next festival, and provide good cross-over opportunities in terms of promoting our year-round repertory seasons. A few of the things we’d like to try are a bit reliant on Letterboxd’s development, but, for example, it would be great by next year to be able to see listings for the festival’s screenings in a similar way to how you can see new release showtimes near you on a film’s Letterboxd page.

SAR: Yes that sounds like it would be a very valuable addition to the HQ accounts. When I’ve gone to festivals or event screenings at cinemas, I’ve found that when I go to log the film afterwards I’ll see people on Letterboxd saying they watched it at the same screening I was at. Do people often tag Cinema Rediscovered in their reviews, and have you noticed a mini-community forming as a result?

SR: So yes people do often tend to tag the festival, mainly for their own reminder of the context in which they saw it, but unfortunately you can’t currently search by tag (you can only do it for your own entries at the moment), in terms of how other users log their views. So finding reviews from people who’ve watched films at your festival tends to be quite a laborious manual task, especially if you don’t already follow them, as it involves combing through recent loggings of particular titles right after you’ve screened them. But at least the way that users tend to be tagging their entries is helpful when spotting, for example tagging it ‘cineredis24’ (as we’d encouraged) or ‘cinema rediscovered 24’ and so forth.

SAR: Have you ever found someone locally through Letterboxd and ended up working together? For example, to write programme notes or speak at an event?

SR: No, I can’t say we’ve had it that way round yet, but a lot of the people we commission to write editorial/stories have their own Letterboxd accounts and sometimes have quite a following. I think this speaks to the problem we often have with Letterboxd and searching it – both something that comes up with searching for tags, but also even finding people on there, it feels like the search engine & mechanics could do with a bit of refining potentially.

SAR: That’s very helpful, thank you both!