By Robyn Iron
After growing up in Montana, as a wild child of the woods, Lara Tomov studied filmmaking at Emerson College in Boston, lived abroad in Central America, was based in Los Angeles for a decade, and is now happily back home in Montana. Lara has worked as a camera operator and cinematographer for narrative & documentary films, and television networks such as Travel Channel, Discovery, and National Geographic. Her work has taken her to more than 30 countries, and she always appreciates observing how different cultures and communities interact with their landscape.
In 2020, Lara founded the hybrid production company, Stories for Action, which works to spark positive momentum through the power of storytelling, and focuses on content that connects community and environmental well-being. Stories for Action produces short films, a podcast series, and leads Story Workshops. Lara holds a BA in Film from Emerson College and a Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Systems from UCLA. She is also a licensed drone pilot and certified PADI Rescue SCUBA Diver and underwater camera operator.
University of Montana journalism student Robyn Iron recently interviewed Tomov about social media. What follows is a transcript of the conversation, edited slightly for brevity and clarity.
Q: How is the importance of staying relevant on social media helped you share your stories?
A: I mean, I appreciate the relevancy of the medium of social media because a lot of why we started stories for action is to reach audiences that weren’t going to sit down for a two-hour documentary film about a certain topic. And so, the opportunity to have people kind of stumble upon our content. That’s kind of the purpose of why we started stories for action.
So, it gives us that medium to share even shorter clips of our short films to really pull people in who may not think that they’re interested in a certain topic. Myself, I haven’t been, you know, formally trained in social media. So, I also battle with trying to find the best ways to get our content out there to learn more about, you know, what the algorithm rewards and what it doesn’t. But I do try to at least, you know, because I’m not just putting my time into social media, it’s also producing content.
So, I’m not able to put as much time into social media as I would like to. I’m not able to post necessarily every day, but I do make sure to keep the stories posted. Because that’s something I’ve learned is that folks say that you don’t have to post every day necessarily for the algorithm to like you or reward your content. But as long as you keep stories posted somewhat frequently, so I put more time into that and it takes less time to share repost a story, right? That’s also a lot of what stories for action likes to do is curate content from other people. And so, the stories create a great avenue to do that, easily, quickly and link directly to the producer of that content.
Q: Has social media benefited you by reaching a larger audience?
A: Yes. Yes, absolutely, and a lot of our posts, even if, you know, we can’t run an ad on it, the post still gets out there, right? And the ability to add hashtags so that you can reach people that aren’t following you already. You know, and, and I, I strategically use hashtags that don’t just preach to the choir of the posts that I’m posting, but to literally the opposite of that audience. And so, since that is a lot of our purpose of stories for action is to yes reach the choir, but also reach those people that think they have the issues going on in a certain community or in a certain landscape, have nothing to do with them. Like those are the people that I want to reach. And so, hashtags are a way that you can do that.
It’s given us the ability to expand our reach, you know, and then also through when we post clips on YouTube that gets a lot of like quote accidental traffic as well as social media. So yes, that being a lot of our intent of the content we create is to reach beyond the choir. It does allow us to do that.
Q: How much time do you have to commit to social media?
A: It’ll be like 10 minutes here, 20 minutes here. But to create a post usually takes me about an hour just because I overthink the wording on my post so much. You know, and a lot of our posts are video clips. So, I have to not only edit down that video clip but then create a caption, right? And overthinking the words, sometimes I run it by somebody else like is this fit. And so I, I might take more than the average person in time to, to create a post. But as a filmmaker, you know, coming from the film world where you’re working on a product that’s two hours long, potentially, and it’s only going to be seen in a theater or in YouTube or in a, you know, a classroom. I’m rethinking my own work and approach to make sure that my work remains relevant.
I used to think that, you know, 30 minutes was a short film, but now that seems incredibly long with the way that people are getting content nowadays. And so, I’m even rethinking like, you know, starting next year, am I going to completely move away from film as we know it and just focus on doing like 62nd vignette clips, you know, and then how do you fund that? How do you get, you know, a funder to pay you what it actually takes to go out in the field, maybe drive quite a distance, take time to interview someone edit it if you’re just getting a 62nd product, right?
But I’m, I’m constantly thinking of like, well, maybe that is how we need to reform our own business model and the way that I put stories out there to only focus on content that’s for social and not doing anything over like two minutes.
This Q&A is part of a series created by students in Courtney Cowgill’s Social Media and Audience Engagement course at the University of Montana School of Journalism. Students sought out creatives who are doing using media for good to offer tips and insights into the ever-evolving landscape of social media.
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