Isn’t it time you looked at integrating ticketing on Facebook?
29 November, 2011 at 9:38 am Tim Roberts ARTS Australia 4 comments
Rob Martin, Digital Marketing Manager at The Lowry, Salford explains the implementation of Facebook ticketing at their venue as reported on the AMA COMMONS. Of note is the fact that at a cost of just £500 to integrate the new service, it paid for itself in the first month!
According to Rob “On average we sell around 50% of our tickets online, with the percentages rising for music and comedy.” Google Analytics revealed how important their Facebook page was for referring traffic, so logically they explored the option of selling tickets directly from Facebook.
“Live performances and ticket inventory taken from the Box office system into the … CMS now allows the website to share that information with Facebook users. The Facebook Events Page is a web application that … retrieves the current event information from the website via an exposed web service.“
Read more about the solution that paid for itself in a month: Lowry’s portrait of a Facebook ticketing operation
Entry filed under: Arts Marketing, audience development, box office, Case Studies, Online, Social Media, Web 2.0. Tags: Arts Marketing, audience development, case study, Online, Social Media, Web 2.0.
1.
Chris Unitt | 29 November, 2011 at 10:14 am
At Made Media we did something similar for Warwick Arts Centre. We built it by modifying the code that we used to build their mobile website, making that pre-existing resource go a little further.
As far as ticketing integration goes, I think these things are good, but really they’re just links from FB back to the venue’s main website. There’s nothing new about that – links from status updates or from FB event descriptions do much the same thing. The only arts venue I’ve seen go the whole way is Lichfield Garrick who’ve iframed the whole ticket pathway into a custom tab, and I’m not sure I’m entirely convinced by.
2.
David Martin | 30 November, 2011 at 7:32 am
We at The PumpHouse Theatre in NZ have been playing around with integrating ticketing and what’s on for a while now thanks to great iframe support through PatronBase (still a few small things to iron out). The question I do have however, how secure is it running the complete booking process within an iframe within a FB page?
3.
Tim Roberts | 30 November, 2011 at 2:05 pm
Hi David
Good to hear from you.
Others may be best placed to provide an answer on the security or otherwise of an iframe implementation.
My guessstimate is that whether offering a booking process online on its own or framed in a Facebook page is similar. The area of potential impact is the actual level of integration with Facebook via API or similar.
Tim
4.
David | 1 December, 2011 at 6:04 pm
Apparently an iframe within in FB is secure, and using PatronBase iframe option allows to do the whole booking without leaving facebook. http://www.facebook.com/thepumphouse
It is not only the ability to book tickets through FB but the whats on listing and with the iframe integration I only needed to set it up once and it is always up to date.