Facebook Connect: From Fans to Ticket Buyers
We’ve all lamented how difficult it is to tie social media engagement directly to ticket sales. Then, in walks Facebook Connect! Ok, so FBC has been around for about a year, but I think at least a few theatres (and online ticketing companies) should be ready to take the plunge. More than 80,000 businesses and 60 million users are using Facebook Connect to register and sign in to sites around the web — everywhere from EventBrite to Lallapalooza to Netflix, and we can learn something from each of them.
First, a user signs in to your website via a button:
Then, FB Connect pre-fills registration details (like name, email, location, etc) which the user can change or accept with a single click.
Finally, your site can now access* a Facebook user’s:
- Identity: name, photos, events, and more.
- Social Graph: friends and connections.
- Stream: activity, distribution, and integration points within Facebook, like stream stories and Publishers.
In Facebook’s own words, Facebook Connect delivers a number of benefits, including:
Traffic
Enable over 400 million Facebook users to share your content with their friends on Facebook. Let users publish a story, invite their friends, or send an event. Their friends then click back to your site, increasing both unique visitors and pageviews.
Engagement
Users can immediately find their friends and engage. More friends leads to more activity and more pageviews. Connected users create 15–60% more content than users who have not connected with Facebook Connect.
Registration
Every website wants registration to be easy. Facebook has 400 million users, simple registration, and robust data. By increasing traffic, user engagement, and registrations, you can grow your revenue and increase opportunities for monetezation.
And here’s where things get fun. Say I’ve registered for your website through Facebook Connect, and I decide to buy a ticket to your next show. When I click that final “Confirm Purchase” button on your eTicket site, I’m given the option of publishing this ticket purchase to my Facebook page. And tomorrow, when one of my friends happens to log on to your website, they’ll see that I’ve just bought tickets to your next show. Can you imagine what the Facebook newsfeed would look like during the high point of your season subscription campaign?
Or how about a recommendations model built like Netflix. Sometimes I run across a theatre who’s producing a show I have no interest in, but I’m sure it’s right up the alley of one of my friends. Other times, I come home in love with a production I just saw but don’t have the time or energy (or frankly, inclination) to write a full on review. What if your theatre made it a little easier for me to give a digital thumbs up? And made sure that my thumbs up showed up not only on Facebook, but also in the ticketing check out cart of all of my Facebook friends.
Imagine I’m an online box office like BrownPaperTickets or Chroma: I have an opportunity to easily link Facebook Events to online ticket sales. Theatres benefit by saving time; ticket buyers benefit by finding out who’s doing what in their social circle. By aggregating data across various theatres in a city, we would also start to get a much better idea of the true size of the arts marketplace. Build up enough data, and we may start to notice demographic and psychographic trends for certain plays: the holy grail of predictive revenue models.
Facebook Connect has been out of beta for nearly a year and a half now and has received largely rave reviews. It’s free, though it does take some IT muscle to implement. But it’s made some impressive success stories with user engagement and increasing page views to connected sites. When Marc Schiller, CEO of Elecric Artists spoke to my social media marketing class last week, he mentioned one client whose acquisition of email addresses increased five fold following their implementation of Facebook Connect for website registration. Who doesn’t need more email addresses?
Have any other ideas about how theatres (or the industry at large) could be using Facebook Connect? Skeptical about user privacy? Know of any theatres already using Connect?
*The technical details are slightly more complicated than this. There are many privacy levels both you and the user can select.
Bonus: Marc’s very cool presentation on Social Media Trends for 2010:
What To To Look For And Act On In 2010
View more presentations from Electric Artists, Inc.
