It isn’t magic. At the end of the day, the math for filmmakers (and distributors and other artists) is pretty simple:

You can either spend a lot on marketing or slowly build a base of fans.

But you must do the second one early and it takes a lot of hard work. It can’t be bought. Social marketing never works from scratch even with a big budget (although as Psy shows, money helps a lot). 

This seems simple enough, perhaps too simple to share. But I get calls and emails from filmmakers and artists, as well as big companies, all the time about this. They think they can just start marketing something on Facebook or Twitter and win. But they can’t, because they haven’t built that base of fans. They have to spend dollars instead. And all the time, I hear from filmmakers that social doesn’t work, you have to be Kevin Smith or that Eddie Burns is just lucky. But that’s not it. They did the hard work. They built their fan base, and it works.