Introduction

Social Media is a set of technologies and channels targeted at forming and
enabling a massive community of participants to productively collaborate.
These technologies are media for social interaction, and can take many di!erent
forms including internet forums, blogs, wikis, podcasts, videos, social
bookmarking, and social networking sites.

There are key characteristics that di!erentiate social media solutions from
other forms of communication. A core principle of social media is participation
and the only way to achieve benefits from social media is by mobilising the
community to contribute. It is not enough to simply collect comments from
participants, transparency allows other to see, comment, use, validate and rate
other participant’s contributions. This encourages further participation and
actually shows that you can’t control, predict or model interactions like you can
with other communications channels.

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Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

This article will focus on a specific channel of social media – social networking
sites, Twitter and Facebook specifically. Started in 2006, Twitter is an information
network where millions of people and businesses share and discover new
information. With over 200,000,000 registered users and 460,000+ new sign-
ups daily, Twitter is becoming a powerful tool for businesses. It allows you to
share information, gather market intelligence and insights and build relationships.

Founded in 2004, Facebook has more than 500,000,000 active users with 50%
of them logging on to Facebook in any given day. Users spend over 700 billion
minutes per month on Facebook and 250,000,000 active users currently
accessing Facebook through their mobile devices. The average user on
Facebook has 130 friends.

Problem

How to integrate social media into your traditional marketing activity and leverage
the new opportunities this channel presents? Many people are hesitant to
dive into the social media world due to fear of the unknown (new technologies)
and the possible threats that it could present. But it is now becoming impossible
to ignore the power of social media and in particular social networking
sites as a sales channel for events. Next we will look at the benefits for utilising
these types of sites in your marketing activities and how you can capitalise.

Solution

Social Media becomes Social Commerce

Previously everyone talked about e-commerce, basically the process of selling
things on the internet. Since the introduction of social media, this has evolved
into social commerce, using social media platforms such as Facebook to sell
things. When you think about an audience of 500,000,000 users on Facebook,
this become a very attractive sales channel, particularly given the nature of
Facebook – a network where we often look to others when making decisions
and our network structure impacts who we ask or are influenced by. Word of
mouth is a powerful tool in promoting events and in a Facebook context there
is huge potential. If you have 1,000 passionate fans on Facebook, they buy a
ticket to your event, they each tell 10 friends who tell a further 10 friends, that’s
100,000 people who have been told about an event by someone they trust and
can potentially be influenced by.

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Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Steps to Integrating Social Media
into your Event Marketing

Step
1
Step
2
Set up a company or event page on
Facebook – it’s simple and free to do!
Facebook Pages allow artists, businesses, and brands to showcase
their work and interact with fans. These pages come pre-installed
with custom functionality designed for each category. For example,
a band Page has a music player, video player, discography,
reviews, tour dates, and a discussion board that the artists can
take advantage of. Third party developers will also build an array of
applications that they will compete for Page Admins to add to their
Pages. Facebook Pages are also not subject to a fan limit and can
automatically accept fan requests. If you are the o”cial repre-
sentative of an organisation, business, or event you can create a
Page to represent your organisation on Facebook. To create your
own Facebook page visit
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
and follow the steps.
Encourage people to become a
fan of your Facebook page
A few suggestions for increasing the number of fans: email your
database and ask your customers, prospects, etc to become fans.
There are a variety of free email marketing tool available such as
MailChimp http://mailchimp.com/ that you can use to email your
database in a professional, cost e!ective manner. Include Face-
book and Twitter pages links in your email newsletters and put
links to your Facebook and Twitter pages in your email signature
and on your website.
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Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Communicate with your fans
Post engaging content – links, videos, photos, comments that
encourage fans to interact with the page, post comments, like your
posts and share posts with others. Facebook has a Resources
section which allows you to send updates to your fans. There is the
ability to segment who you send the message to by location,
gender or age. To access this section, log into your Facebook Page
and click edit info at the top of the page. Next click on Resources
and then Send an Update. In this screen you can select who you
send the update to, add the subject and message text. Send your
fans a message telling them that they are able to buy tickets for
your event through the Facebook ticketshop and be sure to include
a link to the ticketshop.
Integrating your website with
Facebook is a great way to increase
the number of fans on your
Facebook page
Facebook has a number of ways that you can integrate social
plugins across your website from like buttons, activity feeds,
recommendations, like boxes, to live streams. For information on
how to integrate these plugins with your website visit
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/
Step
3
Step
4
There’s more…
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Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Sell tickets through your
Facebook Page
Setup a ticketshop so that you can commence social commerce
and sell tickets to your event through your Facebook page and
reach those potential 100,000 people! Customers that buy tickets
for an event through Facebook can communicate this to their
complete network of friends with one click and automatically
update their status with links to the Facebook ticketshop spread-
ing the potential for ticket sales to an even greater number of
people. Visit www.ticketscript.com for more information on setting
up your own Facebook ticketshop.
Integrate Social Media Channels
Connect your Facebook account with Twitter so that you reduce
duplication of e!ort with only having to post content once.
Step
5
Step
6
There’s more…
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Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Step
7
Step
8
It is important not to forget –
monitoring results from this activity!
Regularly view the insights from your Facebook page and monitor
the number of fans you have, how many likes you have, the
number of post views (some posts may engage users more than
others – investigate why), demographics of your fans – what
countries are they from, what gender and age are they, this infor-
mation could be used in other marketing activity to focus on a
particular target market.
Track E!ectiveness
Research tools available to track the e!ectiveness of all your
activities. One suggestion is http://bit.ly/ a tool that shortens,
shares and tracks your links – great for Twitter posts but also
analysing who is clicking on links.
Summary

Social media is becoming a key component of marketing for events and social
networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have the ability to spread the
word about your event with low financial investment. Understanding how you
can leverage your presence is critical but the main thing is to have a presence
and begin utilising the potential as a sales channel.

For more information on setting up your own Facebook ticketshop to sell tickets
to your event please visit www.ticketscript.com

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Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook