Ticketmaster Increases Sales With Facebook Integration

Ticketmaster is seeing an increase in sales thanks to a simple Facebook integration, Joshua Brustein reports in his recent New York Times article. 

Ticketmaster’s website encourages show goers to post their purchases to Facebook. For each time a user decides to do so, Ticketmaster makes an additional $5.30. When the customer posts where they’re located on the seating chart, that gain goes up to $8.

Along with more profits, Joshua Brustein wrote that the integration allows the company to find out more about their customers. “The average purchase through the ticketing site is 2.7 tickets,” he said. “While Ticketmaster gathers lots of data about the people who buy the tickets, it knows practically nothing about their guests.” Since the ticket purchaser’s friends now have the opportunity to check in on Facebook by announcing their purchase and seat location, the company will be able to collect further data on its customers.

And yet another success story — Eventbrite earns an additional $2.52 when a user posts about his or her ticket purchases on Facebook. This type of social media integration is working out very well for companies, and no wonder — users are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on a social media referral. 

Ryan Cote, Project Manager for Ballantine Digital, points out that companies have a huge opportunity to capitalize on post-purchase referrals by enabling social sharing. By offering incentives to customers for posting about their purchases on Facebook, companies can look forward to increased customer usage and engagement.

And it doesn’t hurt to incentive users to make referrals. Dropbox, for example, has seen success in the post-purchase referrals space, though it relies solely on email invitations, instead of integrating Facebook into the process. For every successful referral, Dropbox provides the referring user with an extra 250 megabytes
of storage per month. This strategy results in 1 million referrals per month. Not too shabby, eh?

Ticketmaster and Eventbrite are seeing success with post-purchase referrals sent to Facebook, and Dropbox receives millions of referrals a year on email alone.  People trust their friends more than they trust brands — so why not make it easier for them to refer their buddies?