Do social media sell tickets?
/ 09 November 2009 - 11:19 am
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4 Comments
Is anyone actually getting any proven evidence that Facebook, Twitter, Youtube etc sell tickets??
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We certainly are at THE EDGE. We’re using e-commerce reporting and tagged links in Google Analytics to measure “conversion to purchase” and revenue from transactions from our social media and discovering that our online social networking is resulting in purchase of tickets for a range of performance genres. In fact our Facebook fan page is consistently appearing amongst our most lucrative traffic sources, having inched its way up the results like an eager caterpillar since our fan page and group went live earlier this year. Yep, folks, social media is resulting in ticket sales. Anyone else received this evidence?
Just as a theatregoer, I can admit freely to booking things because of buzz about them - or direct promotions - via Facebook.
If anything, good buzz amongst friends (even if they're in the show!) is a far better way to convince me to attend than any other kind of marketing - so finding ways to centralise discussion of your show, like setting up a 'fan page' on F'book, makes it easy for me to hear good things about it. The more people I see signing up to attend, or commenting how much they enjoyed it, the more likely I am to reach the tipping point of calling to book...
That's where the social discussion of these things is happening now, much less frequently in person than via social media. (That could be because I'm self-employed & work from home, of course! But lots of people are...)
R!
(p.s. that said, I've also been put off attending things by poorly made / edited 'trailers' of live performance on YouTube. If you're going to create video ads for your show, they've REALLY got to be good, polished, and well edited...whether they're on the web or TV. So if you're dipping your toe in the water, I'd go with text-based sites, or strong still images - not necessarily YouTube.)
Robert Catto, Photographer
Box 15 456, Miramar Wellington
robert@catto.co.nz / http://www.catto.co.nz
644 388 7999 / 6421 38 33 77
Thanks for sharing that perspective, Robert. There is a statistic in the Social Media Revolution video I linked to in another post:
78% of consumers trust peer recommendations.
Only 14% trust advertisements.
You are a living, breathing example of this.
Good point about the trailers needing to hit the mark. Thanks!
Vicki Allpress Hill Connecting audiences to the arts va@vickiallpress.com
Robert - I really liked your post about how you use Facebook from an 'audience' perspective. I know that I certainly look out for recommendations from friends and friends of friends. And if I really like something I've seen I usually post something on Facebook - either personally or profesionally.
Social networking is facilitating word of mouth (which we already know is hugely influential in informing people's choices) in a really fantastic way. The viral nature of social networking makes those small conversations between friends incredibly powerful.
I recently came across a great site - it's dedicated to Word-of-Mouth marketing and includes some really interesting blogs, and useful presentations and case studies about how social networking can transform word of mouth..
Vicki: even though visits to NZLive.com from Facebook don't necessarily result in ticket sales (although we know that we send a huge amount of traffic to ticketing sites), having a presence on Facebook has been really successful for us. Because our aim is promote the activities of the sector and encourage participation in culture, Facebook provides us with another space where we can do that and its driving a lot of traffic to our site.
Facebook is now in our top 10 referring sites and Twitter is in the top 20, so we're really pleased that we can use social networking to more widely promote the events and activities of Kiwi artists and cultural organisations.