5 Tips On How To Convert Your Social Media Following Into Ticket Sales

Running active social media accounts is now deemed to be the most effective form of cheap marketing for business. Selling tickets to your social media followers isn’t easy and it’s not always obvious how to do it. Here are 5 Ticket Tailor tips on how to sell tickets by converting your social media following:

1. Engage Your Followers

Don’t focus on the hard sell. Engage your followers by sharing news, relevant information and by asking questions. Just who would they like to see at your venue? What’s the best gig they’ve ever been to? Who would be their ultimate dinner party guest? Strike up a conversation. Show there’s a human behind your brand.

Conversion is the name of the game here. Think about what it is that you want your audience to actually do. Whether it’s “share this tweet”, “click here to buy”, “sign-up here for regular updates”, etc, all of these are valid calls to action. After reading an engaging piece of content, your audience needs to know what to do next. Tell them.

Use great visuals and easy to share content and you’ll find that loyal followers will promote your business for you

2. Make It Easy To Buy

Don’t have your followers chasing their tails to buy tickets. Make it as simple and as obvious as possible. How? Use a widget on your website or even a WordPress Plugin. If you’re selling on Facebook, use an app to sell directly.

Social media updates should enable the reader to click right through to the point of sale. They shouldn’t have to trawl through your website once they’ve decided to buy.

3. Soft Conversion

You know what it’s like. You see an event advertised for next year but you’ve neither the funds nor the motivation to buy just yet. Don’t let these potential sales go to waste. Take the soft conversion method and offer to remind your followers at a later date.

When you announce an event, give your audience the opportunity to be reminded later. Let them provide their email to you. Invite them to subscribe. Open-up that sales process that should lead to a conversion at a later date. Plus, you’ve secured their email address for future marketing.

4. Incentives

Consider running an incentive campaign for your social media followers. They get a discount, or a chance to win tickets in exchange for raising your profile; they become brand ambassadors essentially.

This works well with Facebook. Invite followers to like and share a status, in exchange for the chance to win free tickets and your event will then be publicised in their friends’ timelines. You’ll get more “likes” and more ticket sales.

Offer an exclusive discount code to Twitter followers, or on Instagram. Everyone wants to get a good deal. Let your followers know that you understand that.

5. Quality, Regular Content

The key to attracting and keeping social media followers and therefore converting to ticket sales is quality, regular content:

• Use a blog to drive traffic to your website and to engage your audience.
• Blog regularly (at least once a week), use original, relevant content and focus it on your target audience.
• Update your social media at least 3 times a week. More for Twitter.
• Remember that it’s ok to sell via social media but don’t make that the only focus. Share stories, information and the odd bit of humour goes a long way. Just be careful though. Nothing controversial!
• Respond to your followers. Answer any queries, in a timely manner.
• Deal with complaints via social media swiftly. Invite the complainant immediately to connect via email or phone. Don’t play out your drama in public!
• Use your social media to create a buzz before the event and after. Once the event’s over, you’d be surprised how much the audience still wants to connect, with you and with other attendees. Remember, you don’t just want your followers to come to one event. Remind them that you’ve plenty more to offer.

It’s not about attracting 1’000s and 1’000s of random social media followers. You want engaged followers to share your content and you want to sell tickets.  Use our 5 tips to get ahead and to get the results that you need.

Find out how to use the Ticket Tailor ticketing system, our widgets and WordPress Plugin to increase your ticket sales.

4 Ways to Boost Ticket Sales for Your Event Using Twitter

Looking for ways to increase ticket sales to your next event? You're probably already aware of it, but Twitter can be a highly-effective tool -- if it's used correctly.

If you want to sell more tickets via your website, the following four tips will help you get the most out of Twitter.

1. Pick a Unique Hashtag

These days, most event planners have caught on to the benefits of creating a unique hashtag for their event.

Unique hashtags make it super-easy for someone to jump straight into any conversation surrounding your event, all whilst building awareness and reinforcing your brand. It also makes it much easier for you to track what people are saying about the event, which will save you a lot of time.

A good hashtag should be short -- remember you only have 140 characters -- and memorable. Make sure your hashtag is well-promoted by including it in every tweet, actively pushing it on your website, and including it in any promotional material you release.

2. Ticket Giveaways

Spreading word of your event as far and wide as possible is a great way to maximise ticket sales.

How do you achieve this? By running a competition.

For maximum impact, make entry as easy as possible: a simple retweet competition works best. Just ask people to retweet to have a chance of winning two tickets to your event, include your unique hashtag, throw in a link to a blog post promoting the event, and you're good to go.

When you give people the chance to win something for free, you'll find them more than willing to promote your event for you, such is the power of the free giveaway -- and all it costs is the price of a couple of tickets.

The aim of your competition is to get your promotional material in front of as many people as possible; by offering a prize for something as simple as retweeting, you get more entries and this spreads your message to a much wider audience.

More people click on your link through to your site, more people buy tickets. Simple.

3. Link to Your Sales Page

When you pique someone's interest in your event from one of your tweets, do you capitalise on this? If not, you're leaving money on the table.

The best way to do this is to throw a link on the end of each tweet linking to a page where a person can buy tickets -- or at the very least, a promotional page for your event.

Sure, if a person is very interested, they will go out of their way to find the place to buy their ticket. But what about someone who is only somewhat interested? Forcing them to do all the heavy lifting might just put them off.

If you want to sell out your event -- and why wouldn't you -- making it as easy as possible to buy tickets is key. Converting impulse buyers and "floating voters" is perhaps the best way to boost your sales.

4. Twitter Widget for Social Proof

Never underestimate the power of social proof.

It's basic human psychology: If I can show you that other people are excited about an event, you yourself will be more drawn to that event.

Using this logic, if you've managed to generate a huge buzz around your event, by leveraging this correctly you'll generate a whole lot more -- and that means extra ticket sales.

So how do you do this?

Well, the best way is to show-off what other people are saying about your event on your website -- and, with Twitter being the go-to place for people to express their opinion on anything and everything, it's a good place to start.

Twitter have created their own plugin for this very purpose. You can create a feed that shows everything people are saying relating to a specific hashtag -- making it even more important you come up with something unique!

Simply click on this link, login to Twitter then click Create New. From there, click on the Search tab, and input your hashtag in the Search Query field -- you can select more than one if needed.

Play around with the customisation settings until you're happy; you can edit the size of the widget, colour scheme and link colour. When you're done, simply hit Create Widget and copy and paste the code it generates.

Code can be quite intimidating, but in this case it doesn't have to be. For WordPress users, all you need to do is head over to your dashboard, click Appearance > Widgets then drag a Text widget into your sidebar. Paste your code into this widget and you're done!

If you're using HTML, simply paste the code directly where you want it to go -- the Javascript comes with the relevant HTML tags, which means you can paste it straight in.

Now, when visitors view your site, they will see the good things others are saying about your event on Twitter -- if you sell tickets via your website, this can be very persuasive.

Wrapping Up

These four tips are incredibly simple to implement but will have a positive impact on your bottom line -- sometimes a simple approach generates the most success!

Have you had experience promoting your event using Twitter? Share your experiences with us in the comments section below!