Fukrey Movie Used Social Media Marketing Tools To Garner More Than 200% Profits

About Fukrey

Fukrey is an Indian comedy movie released in June 2013 by Indian film studio Excel Entertainment Ltd based in Mumbai. Excel Entertainment was created in 1999 by Farhan Akhtar and R Sidhwani. In-spite of having a relatively unknown and not so famous cast, Fukrey did great on the box office performance and was able to garner more than 200% profits. It adopted good social media marketing strategy, effectively utilising platforms like Twitter as the primary channel, while Facebook playing the supporting role. This had great impact before the release of the movie and translated into continuous organic growth on social media even after the release of the movie.

Business Objective of Fukrey

• Main objective was attracting more and more audiences to the theatres to watch a movie not boasting huge names in Bollywood but an unknown cast.
• Reaching out and attracting the attention of the masses and encouraging them to notice and watch the movie.
• Creating conversations between the movie’s cast and their fans.

Strategy/Approach Adopted By Fukrey

• Since main objective was to generate lot of buzz around the film through influencers, fans thus Twitter was chosen as the main platform of action while Facebook was to be used as the supporting channel.
• To involve and engage fans on a regular basis a daily activity known as of ‘Sabsey Bade Fukrey‘ was initiated. Here the fans were asked to create a Fanpage of ‘Fukrey’ and populate it with content in the form of daily activities/posts around the film. In the end the fan page having the maximum likes/followers were rewarded.
• Keeping the fans engaged till the end was the main aim. To achieve this and keep up the momentum an activity called ‘Fukra Party’ was planned.
• Breaking away from the conventional music launches on social media via an event page or a tab, an out of the box strategy was adopted for the release of music of Fukrey. Singer of one of the movie’s hit song ‘Ambarsariya’ Sona Mohapatra was handed over for a day, the official twitter handle of the movie to release the song. This was the highlight as she engaged the fans by interacting and answering all their questions.
• The song ‘Ambarsariya’ and the singer Sona Mohapatra, connected pretty well with the movie’s target audience and gained a lot of good response on radio. Thus it was decided to also create an acoustic version of the song. This acoustic version also garnered good traction and connected quite well with fans.
• Another strategy was creating parody posters and using them as marketing gimmicks. This was based on lines of Hollywood flicks Scavengers and Man of Steal. The idea was to add a comic element in the content and make it funny/hilarious. This generated lot of interest and many fans were sharing and talking about it.
• Other activities included jugaad event, live tweeting of the trailer launch to updating the fans and audience in real time.
• In addition to this, lot of twitter hashtags were seeded to constantly engage with the fans. Some of them were #Fukra, #ChoochaMoment, #JugaadAt859, #TwitterKeFukrey, #CALL5464646, #IWantFukrey2 etc. These hashtags trended nationally.

Key Results

• The official .Fukrey’ twitter handle received around 238 retweets per 100 tweets, at about 92 replies per 100 tweets.
• Likes on Facebook continued growing organically at 52% even post release of the movie.
• The acoustic version of the song ‘Ambarsariya’ received around 118,110 views.
• The strategy of parody posters paid off and helped gaining an engagement level of 0.6% on Facebook.
• On Twitter 6 hashtags trended nationally with a total social media reach of more than 6 million and an advertising cost of over Rs. 15 lakh.
• Positive social mentions for the movie ‘Fukrey’ in the week of its launch were about 4 times that of the film ‘Ye Jawaani Hai Deewani’
• These strategies helped Fukrey’s profits to cross 200% at the box office.

Key Findings

• Another good example of successful integration of social media platforms like twitter and Facebook.
• Making effective use of social media marketing strategies can help a small business with limited resources at its disposal to achieve its business objective as in this case the movies cast didn’t boasted of big star-cast but still it was able to garner profits to the tune of 200%.
• Taking assistance from experts and celebrities to promote/tweet for you helps you to enhance your engagement with your followers.
• Adding comic flavour to your content keeps your audience amused and engaged with your brand.
• Running contests and feeding exciting and unique content keeps your fans interested and helps your business gain good traction.