By Paul Nicholson
May 9 – The holy grail of how to monetise large Facebook groups has taken a step closer with the launch of a social ticketing application, SitNearMe. A Facebook app that sits within the Facebook canvas.
Developed by Evento Social Promotion, SitNearMe was implemented this week by the Israeli Football Association (IFA) for the Israeli Cup Final. The IFA will also use the app to sell tickets to national team matches in a deal that run until the end of the qualifying campaign for the 2014 World Cup.
The app enables fans to book seats and purchase tickets without leaving the Facebook platform – staying within the Facebook platform is key as getting users to leave Facebook once they are logged-in is notoriously difficult.
The app uses a socially smart seating map which links Facebook users’ profiles to their seats and enables their friends to see where they are sitting.
Evento marketing director Yair Scher said: “There are a number of compelling benefits for rights holders to use this app. Obviously it is an additional channel for ticket sales, but the major benefit here is that it overcomes the 45% drop in traffic when diverting users from Facebook to external websites. By selling tickets in Facebook they can reach more fans.”
To date, Evento’s clients have generally sold around 15% of their online tickets through the site. But it would be logical to expect this to only grow through the viral nature of the platform and the sharing functionality. The social reach of the rights holder’s fan page is boosted taking the ticket buying opportunity to more people – every ticket buyer is promoting the event on his Facebook feed. This in turn will increase page likes and the increasingly important “talking about” stats.
The business model for SitNearMe is very simple, a basic set up and service fee plus a commission for every ticket sold through the application. Cost is based on the level of customisation required and can either be a one-off fee or annual. Commission on ticket sales is negotiable based on volume but is “a single digit percentage”.
Evento was set up with the aim of helping sports teams to increase their ticket sales through social media engagement as awareness of the events is expanded beyond traditional ticketing platforms. The Israel-based company raised new investment from ‘angel’ investors and an un-named German ticketing agency in January and is already providing the app to a number of clubs in different sports across Europe, though it has its sights set on Europe’s federations and, through them, the club market.
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