About Sociable

Opportunity for event marketers

Social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace represent a huge opportunity for event marketers to promote their events, as there is tremendous crossover between users of social networking sites and the online ticket buying population. According to Comscore MediaMetrix, over 70% of the U.S. online ticket buying population is under 35 years of age, while 60% of Facebook users are 18-35 years old.

Events as a product are particularly well-suited for marketing via social media as they represent a social experience for people. To take advantage of social media marketing, event marketers should think of ways they can market the social experience the event represents to each particular person, rather than marketing the event as a whole. Friends exert tremendous influence on the purchase decision for events by making friends aware of events and building consensus around how to spend one's social time. To the general ticket buyer, who they spend their time with at an event is often times more important than the event itself. Event promoters no longer need to be a passive observer to these conversations between friends, and can now begin to spur those conversations.

How to approach social media marketing

In the last few years, most event promoters have either ignored social networking sites or built a presence on these sites to communicate with their customers in a new environment. Often times these communications between the event promoter and consumer are viewed as spam. Even when they are not viewed as spam, they are still missing the much larger opportunity, which is spurring conversations amongst friends about events, thereby enabling users to do the word of mouth marketing themselves.

While social networking sites attained mainstream popularity in 2004, it is only within the last year that these sites have begun to operate as open environments. The launch of Facebook Connect in December 2008 for the first time enabled content and commerce sites to access the communication channels on Facebook from their own domain. This has empowered ticketing and event sites to leverage their user base and traffic to spur conversations on Facebook. Thus, the key for event marketers is to use your event content to start conversations that take place on Facebook (and other social networking sites).

The Sociable solution

The first part of the Sociable solution enables our partners to take advantage of key elements of Facebook Connect. We provide the necessary plumbing to enable your users to post content to their profile ("Wall"), their friends' newsfeeds (now the "Stream"), and send notifications or event invitations to friends on Facebook. This is achieved via the Sociable application. In addition to the use of the Sociable application, we provide you with code for the user call to action ("buttons"). These buttons are typically placed on event pages prior to purchase, ticket confirmation pages post-purchase, or e-mail newsletters.

Enabling your users to communicate with their friends on Facebook about an event is only the first part of the Sociable solution. While there are other services that will enable sharing of content on Facebook, our solution is unique because we index every event and associate it with a Facebook user ID. This makes it possible to re-surface the event content to the user's friends at different points in time leading up to the event. The net result is that we increase the number of impressions of your event content thereby driving increased clicks and incremental ticket sales. In addition to publishing your event content into the Facebook newsfeed (stream), we also distribute it to the Sociable consumer application user base, the Sociable Partner Network (including sites like LiveNation, Evite, and RazorGator), and other Facebook application partners with large user bases.

We encourage you to read more about our Solution and Contact Us for more information.