Promoting a new movie across the social web nowadays is an integral part of most movie marketing as the film studios and distributors try to get their movie of the moment talked up and shared online. The ultimate goal is more ticket sales and great viewing numbers at the cinema.

There’s also the subsequent revenue and brand opportunities with merchandising and streaming/sales of digital and disc versions of the film once the cinema run is over.

Buzz-building across the social web as an integral part of executing on the marketing plan can have a powerful effect over the long term.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter are the typical mainstays of such activity. A social network that wouldn’t naturally spring to mind when you think of consumer movie marketing is LinkedIn.

Yet, why not if you have the right movie with the right messaging and marketing well suited to a business network?

That’s what 20th Century Fox is doing with Taken 3, the final episode in the action movie trilogy starring Liam Neesen that hits cinemas worldwide in January 2015.

Watch this video and see Neeson himself explaining what LinkedIn has to do with this…

What it boils down to is a contest – follow the Taken 3 LinkedIn showcase page, make sure the Skills section of your own profile highlights “your particular set of skills,” and wait and see if you’ve won the prize.

If you’ve watched previous Taken movies, you’ll know that the Neeson character sets great store on a “particular set of skills.”

The prize includes Liam Neeson in his Bryan Mills character endorsing “your particular set of skills” on LinkedIn, recording a video of him doing so. Specifically:

A custom video including Liam Neeson that includes elements of the Grand Prize winner’s LinkedIn profile information and the user’s skills as listed in their LinkedIn Skills section. This video will be shared with the user and will be posted to 20th Century Fox-owned or managed social channels, which may include: LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and/or other websites.

That video will undoubtedly form a further element of the movie marketing leading up to the film’s opening in cinemas in the US on January 8 (and here’s the spoiler – the contest is open only to US residents). And of course, raise the profile of the contest winner across the social web.

It demonstrates some great imagination to make use of a primary business social network in a way that’s bound to attract quite some attention (including people writing blog posts about it like this one).

But get cracking – the contest closes at a minute to midnight US Pacific time on December 23.

(Via Entrepreneur.com)