IntroductionSocial 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!er-ent 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.

Increase Your Event Ticket SalesThrough Facebook

1 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 informa-tion 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 relation-ships.

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.

ProblemHow to integrate social media into your traditional marketing activity and lever-age 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 impossi-ble 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.

SolutionSocial Media becomes Social CommercePreviously 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.

Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Steps to Integrating Social Media into your Event Marketing

Step

1

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.phpand follow the steps.

Step

2

Encourage people to become a fan of your Facebook pageA 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.

3 Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Step

3

Communicate with your fansPost 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.

Step

4

Integrating your website with Facebook is a great way to increase the number of fans on your Facebook pageFacebook 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/

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Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Step

5

Sell tickets through your Facebook PageSetup 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.

Step

6

Integrate Social Media ChannelsConnect your Facebook account with Twitter so that you reduce duplication of e!ort with only having to post content once.

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5 Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook

Step

7

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.

Step

8

Track E!ectivenessResearch 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.

SummarySocial 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

Increase Your Event Ticket Sales Through Facebook