Eventbrite & Facebook: Perfect Together

On Monday, June 6, 2011, I attended the RealTime Report in New York City.  A rebranding of TWTRCON, this year’s conference focused on more case studies and “tales from the trenches”.  Over the next few posts, I’ll share those case students that really exemplify what real time marketing is and how companies are leveraging this approach to marketing.

One of the first speakers of the morning was Tamara Mendelson of Eventbrite.  I’ve used Eventbrite’s ticket service as both an attendee and an event planner and find them to be extremely efficient. This case study examined of “The Value of Being Liked” and the reach of event sharing on Facebook.

Back in 2008 when Eventbrite first took a look at the origins of traffic to their site, they focused on the major search engines like Google and Yahoo to promote their brand and events.  SEO became their primary online marketing focus, but over time they became aware that both organizers and attendees shared event information on Facebook.  Initially, users would copy and past event information into Facebook to share with friends.  When Eventbrite realized that their fastest growing inbound traffic came from Facebook, they worked with the social media company to create the capacity to “Publish to Facebook” now available.

Facebook is now the second largest traffic source for Eventbrite, with Twitter and Linkedin also in the top 10.  The ability for ticket buyers to immediately publish event info to their Facebook page and Twitter feed provides a real time opportunity for event organizers to promote their offering to a more receptive audience.  After all, if you friend is going, aren’t you more likely to go along too?

The concept of the “virtuous cycle” was first mentioned in this case study.  It’s been awhile since I heard this term used, but I quickly realized that this may be the beauty of social media and promotion in real time.  I purchase a ticket on Eventbrite then push that to my Facebook page, my good friend @mswas sees that I’m going and realizes that we haven’t seen each other for awhile, clicks on the link, purchase a ticket, posts it to her Facebook page … infinite loops in programming may be very very bad, but in real time marketing, they are priceless!

Below is a wonderful graphic that quickly explains how Eventbrite’s metrics with regard to Facebook integration: