Welcome to Fly Tips- messages from the Ticketfly Marketing Team, where you will find helpful hints for selling out your next event.

Are you spending extra time building Facebook events and Tweets on your own? Not anymore! Try Ticketfly Amplifier!

Why should you Amplify?
• Amplified events sell around 10 times more tickets overall than non-Amplified events
• Build events once (in Backstage) and automatically publish to Facebook and Twitter
• Facebook is Ticketfly’s 2nd highest sales source
• The Amplifier will increase your event RSVPs using several Facebook touch-points
• Schedule multiple timed Tweets. “Set it and forget it.”
• Reach thousands more fans by mentioning and engaging artists on Twitter!

Step 1

After you build your event, promote it in the same place!

Step 2

Amplify on Facebook and Twitter

Be sure, whenever possible, to include the artist’s Twitter name! These are easily searchable and will expand your audience.

The artists are paying attention and will RT your posts!

Step 3

Watch your Stats!

Step 4

Set up Facebook Purchase. If you are using the Facebook Purchase app, you can also decide whether or not you want to have your Amplified events direct customers to the Facebook Page or to the website by going to the Marketing Tab in the sidebar, selecting Amplifier Settings, and making the adjustment.

When you Amplify events, buyers can RSVP during the Facebook Purchase process and they will show up as attending on your website, on Facebook and on Ticketfly.com

If you’d like more information about Ticketfly’s tools and how you can sell more tickets by keeping your event build and marketing in the same place, head over to ticketfly.com/start

Cheers!

-The Ticketfly Marketing Team

Two holiday seasons ago, the Ticketfly team had our annual staff party at Red Devil Lounge. A lot of the night is pretty foggy but one thing we knew for sure- this is a beautiful venue in the heart of San Francisco’s Polk St district that really knows how to throw a party. We see shows there frequently and a few of our favorite artists seem pretty partial to Red Devil as well, including KRS-One and English Beat. As all you artists and venue owners know, if the artists are treated right then you’re gonna get a better show. It’s a San Francisco venue that can’t be missed and we’re happy to say that now you can get tickets for all Red Devil shows on Ticketfly!

In honor of the New Year, Red Devil’s Sweet 16, and other new beginnings, the RDL guys want to reward their loyal customers with a Half Off Sale! Check out this message from the horse’s mouth and then go get some tickets tomorrow!

RED DEVIL LOUNGE: SWEET 16 / HALF OFF SALE! - This Wed 1/11/12 at 10:00am

“The Red Devil Lounge is turning 16 this year, and to mark our coming of age, we plan on celebrating all year long. We kick things off by offering half-off tickets for all of our shows. This kick ass deal is exclusively through our ticketing partner Ticketfly. You can buy tickets to any show at the Red Devil Lounge for 50% of the normal fee this Wednesday, January 11 between 10:00am and 2:00pm. This includes shows from Nikka Costa, The Fixx and Tom Tom Club, Storm Large, The Aggrolites, The Toasters, Hugh Cornwell of the Stranglers, Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols and everything else on the calendar.  All you need to do is go to the Red Devil Lounge website, pick your favorite shows, and when prompted, use the access code.

Get the access code and RSVP to the sale over on Facebook!

Head over to http://www.reddevillounge.com and pick your poison!

RULES :

This promotion is on a first come, first served basis, and a limited amount of tickets are available. You can purchase a maximum of 2 tickets per shows. As always, you must be 21 or over with a valid ID.”

Don’t forget!

Like Red Devil on Facebook

Follow Red Devil on Twitter

Check out their brand new Ticketfly-powered website!

It’s looking like East Austin is becoming the go-to neighborhood for live music. Earlier this fall, Emo’s opened Emo’s East in the Riverside area and now Beauty Bar founder Paul Devitt and Frank Hendrix from Emo’s have joined forces to open The Beauty Ballroom at 2015 E. Riverside Drive. The new venue’s focus will be on booking more national and international acts while still offering the lounge feel and the Beauty Bar aesthetic. The Beauty Ballroom has state of the art light and sound and can accommodate up to 700. The dance floor holds 500 people and there is a balcony that can comfortably fit another 200. Plus there’s an outdoor patio that will have seating for 200. This further expands Ticketfly’s reach in the Austin area after partnering up with ACL Live and Antone’s last year.

The grand opening of The Beauty Ballroom is New Year’s Eve with a special show by Austin’s Grammy Award-winning Grupo Fantasma. This Latin funk Band will definitely bring the New Year in on a good note. (*Note: This show has been moved to Club de Ville on NYE. So it looks like the first official Beauty Ballroom show will be on January 20th!)

With these two Austin live music powerhouses working together, we are sure this new venture will be a success. Also, we’ve got two new places to check out during SXSW 2012!

Be sure to check out their site for a list of upcoming shows.

And yes, we hooked up a new Beauty Ballroom website to match their sparkle!

With Ticketfly’s Facebook Purchase App, promoters will be able to sell tickets directly from their Facebook Fan Pages, creating a seamless purchasing experience for fans that encourages social discovery and sharing behavior, resulting in increased ticket sales.

What’s cool about it?

• Single sign-on with Facebook Connect allows fans to buy tickets using just their Facebook identity, without ever leaving Facebook

• Quick installation process allows promoters to start selling tickets on Facebook within minutes

• Integration with Ticketfly’s Facebook RSVP and Share features promotes social discovery and share

• Real-time analytics reporting provides integrated Facebook sales performance data

• Social graph integration lets Facebook users see what events their friends are attending

• Promoters can harness the power of Facebook to sell more tickets!

Check out the full press release here.

If you’d like to sell tickets via your Facebook Page or would like to know about any other Ticketfly services, you can get more info here. If you’re a current Ticketfly client, please contact your client rep to learn more about how you can install the Facebook Purchase App!

Happy Holidays and happy ticket selling!

If you can pull yourself away from Mafia Wars for a minute, here are some stats to blow your Tuesday minds!

1. 800 Million people are on Facebook.

- That’s over 11% of the planet
- That’s double the population of the entire United States plus ANOTHER TWO HUNDRED MILLION
- If you stacked every Facebook user head to toe, Facebook’s user base would wrap around the moon ABOUT 119 TIMES . Whoa.

2. 90% of time on all Social Networks and 41% of ALL time online is spent on Facebook

- Ummm…that’s bananas
-  53.5 billion minutes per month are spent on Facebook

3. Facebook users market your events for free

- An average user has 130 friends
-  On average,  more than 2 billion posts are liked and commented on per day
-  More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.
-  An average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events. (That means, if you ask them to like your Event or Page, they probably will.)

4. Facebook fans are on the move!

- More than 350 million active users currently access Facebook through their mobile devices
- Mobile users spend more than twice as much time on Facebook than non-mobile users
- An iPhone app for your venue will put Facebook Share right in the hands of these key users

5. Facebook users care about music

- After Movies, TV shows, and Books*, the 4th most popular Facebook Page type is music-related pages
- The most popular Facebook music event in history had over 250,000 RSVPs
- BandPage by Rootmusic is the 6th most popular Facebook app overall nd they’re teamed up with three of Ticketfly’s affiliates, serving up our events and ticket links to millions of Facebook users every day

*I, too, am shocked that people are still reading books after seeing stats 1-4.

With the Facebook behemoth dominating just about every internet statistic there is, it’s crazy not to use it as a marketing tool. Recently, Ticketfly partnered up with Southern Ground Music Festival and via a Facebook contest promotion, and we were able to take their Facebook page from 500 to over 13,000 Fans in about a week. It just works.

How is Ticketfly helping you become the Facebook promoter of your dreams?

- Our website is Facebook- connected
- You can build an event once, and post it to Facebook and an RSVP widget all in one fell swoop
- Soon, In one click, ticket buyers will be able to: (1) create a personalized News Feed story and “like” artists, (2) RSVP to the event, and (3) invite friends to purchase tickets to the same event.
- We provide detailed analytics on how many tickets Facebook is selling for your venue, which events performed the best, and how many people are sharing your events

And so much more to come!

If you are a Ticketfly Client or you’re thinking of switching and you have any questions about running Facebook promotions, the Ticketfly Amplifier, building Facebook events, running Facebook ads, getting more fans or ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING ELSE, please feel free to contact marketing@ticketfly.com

Cheers!

We’re big on transparency over here at the Fly and we love new ideas for music mashups. Our API is available for both commercial and non-commercial use. And our list of awesome API partners is growing every day! Check out some of the latest folks below who are working on some really cool mobile apps and website integrations. Anytime someone wants to make it easier for music fans to find out about our Clients’ shows and share them with friends in the process, we say “Go for it!” Whatever fills the seats, right? We’re pretty smart but we haven’t thought of *everything*.

We also have a dedicated Google Group where our API buddies can ask questions, and get coding tips and support from our API guru.

After you click on all these logos and see what these folks are working on, head over to our API page and get your own key. If you have a site or app that’s ready to go, and you’re interested in making a commission on the tickets you’re referring, check out our Affiliate Network! All of the leading concert listing sites are in the program. Why aren’t you? If you have any questions, shoot us an email at api@ticketfly.com. See you at the show!

]]> http://www.ticketfly.com/the-ticketfly-api-get-it-into-your-cool-things/feed/ 0 http://www.ticketfly.com/ticketflys-design-team-makes-award-winning-websites/ http://www.ticketfly.com/ticketflys-design-team-makes-award-winning-websites/#comments Tue, 06 Sep 2011 19:33:05 +0000 amy@ticketfly.com http://www.ticketfly.com/?p=8821 Thanks to any and all who voted for our clients in SF Weekly’s Web Awards last week. We won we won!

The website we built for The Independent in San Francisco won for Best Local Music Website. We build functional, fully-branded website, mobile apps, and purchase pages for many of our clients around the country. So it’s great to be recognized!

(Eric Steuer is the Creative Director at Creative Commons and a Contributing Editor at Wired Magazine, so we think he might know a little bit about design.)

And we didn’t even have to answer any difficult questions about maps and such as! (This is still funny, by the way).

If you’d like to step up your website game, check us out! We’re waitin for ya.

SF Weekly’s yearly round-up of the best of the San Francisco web recently went live. And look- three different Ticketfly clients have been nominated! Hooray!

Please take a few seconds to vote for our clients. Here’s a quick guide:

#18 Best Local Music Website – Vote for Noise Pop!

#19 Best Music Venue Website – Vote for Rickshaw Stop OR Independent! Take your pick.

#20 Best Podcast – Vote for Noise Pop!

Also worth a mention, SonicLiving and BandsinTown, both Ticketfly Affiliates, have been nominated for:

#17 Best Local Concert Listing Site

Show em your love, music fans.

It’s exciting to see our websites get nominated for things. Ticketfly’s fully-integrated websites are really the future of simple, functional and social venue websites. No more clunky calendars, slow-loading sites and double-posting of events. Not to mention that we’ll host it for free, upgrade it regularly, and build you an email newsletter and mobile app to match. It seems so obvious!

If you want to see some more sites we’ve built for clients around the country, check out this page.

by Eboni Jones, Ticketfly Intern

Stop the presses, a new venue in AZ! One of our buddies at Stateside Presents, Charlie Levy, is opening The Crescent Ballroom in downtown Phoenix. This is a big deal. Ticketfly has worked with Stateside Presents for some time now and is excited they have a venue to call home. Located at 308 North Second Avenue and scheduled to open this fall, the venue is midsized at about 7,000 square feet. Because of Levy’s expertise in the booking business, The Crescent Ballroom already has an impressive lineup of upcoming shows. And Levy says that he is most excited about the shows that have yet to be announced.

The new venue is a warehouse built in 1917 with red brick and vaulted ceilings. Inside the ballroom, Stateside plans to open the Crescent Lounge with food, drinks and DJs allowing the venue to open every day from 4pm. Most importantly, the lounge is always going to be free. “I’m pretty excited about the whole thing,” Levy says. “The bottom line is we’re just going to try hard, to give it 110 percent. We want a place where people want to see bands and are comfortable, and where bands want to play. Hopefully with a little hard work and luck we’ll succeed.” Ticketfly is sure that The Crescent Ballroom will have much success especially with the guys at Stateside Presents at the helm.

Upcoming shows: Phantogram, tUne-YaRdS, The Album Leaf , Friendly Fires with Theophilus London

Be sure to hook up with Crescent Ballroom online!

The Crescent Ballroom on Twitter
The Crescent Ballroom on Facebook
The Crescent Ballroom Site

Hey Promoters! Options abound these days for building your club or festival’s online identity, as well as tools for your loyal fans to check in and get rewards for their show-going. Thought you might like some help making sense of things. On y va!

Facebook Pages

Let’s start with the big, obvious guy: Facebook. Facebook Pages have changed a lot in the past couple years, and they are still an extremely useful tool for building your brand. But we know some of you created your profiles before Pages were available, i.e. First Name “My” Last Name “Club.” Now you have 3,000 Facebook friends that you don’t want to lose by creating a Page. Good news! FB offers a tool for you to migrate those folks over to your business page. Why should you be operating a Facebook Page rather than a Profile?

- No Friend limit (5K on profiles)
- Access to third-party promotional tools for building appealing fan-gates, running contests and surveys, and more!
- Integration with FB Places so you can not only see your Fans, but which ones are actually showing up to the club!
- Most importantly for Ticketfly Clients, our Facebook Amplifier works with Pages (not profiles), so you can auto-post events and create RSVP widgets for all of your ticket pages

Google+

What’s all the buzz about? Well, it’s the first social network to really give Facebook a run for its money. And I absolutely suggest that you familiarize yourself early. Good news and bad news for venues: Google + does not yet have a business option but they will later this year. We’ll let you know when it launches so you can grab your business name! In the meantime, it’s a great way to interact with specific groups of friends. If you have, for example, a list of Google/ Gmail contacts who you want to notify about events, you can collect them all into one Circle, rather than blasting your grandma and junior high boyfriend about it at the same time. It’s awesome!

Foursquare Pages

Foursquare recently ditched their application process for businesses to create a page, and made it fully self-serve. Now your venue loyalists can “follow” your page. You can check ours out here: https://foursquare.com/ticketfly. Here’s an example of a festival page.

I hear you asking: Facebook Places, Google Places, Foursquare, Yelp, Gowalla, do I have to use all of them? We know you don’t all have a full-time social marketing team. The good news with these services is that once your place is established, you don’t HAVE to do much more work. But in general, these location services vary in popularity depending on where you live. Facebook Places is a must. It’s the #1 service people use to check in and it’s growing. As for the others, at the very least you should make sure your place exists, and then try out some specials to see who responds on each service! Whatever happens, you cannot afford to ignore them. The same study showed that users who check in are also big media consumers, most of them are gainfully employed, and most of them have smartphones. In the music business this equals CHA-CHING!

But what do I really think? I’m partial to Facebook Places and Foursquare, sure. But services like Loopt-In have done some cool integrations with event sites (including SonicLiving, another Ticketfly affiliate woop!). The best advice I can give is try and few and focus on what your customers are using!

ReverbNation Venue Pages

ReverbNation (a secondary Ticketfly affiliate, via our partnership with Jambase), has built an awesome Facebook app for venues to create comprehensive profiles. Brooklyn’s Knitting Factory, one of Ticketfly’s very first clients, is using the app and it gives the Knit fan a much richer experience on their page! Aside from basic info, you can post music clips, your upcoming shows (with Ticket links provided by Bandsintown, another Ticketfly affiliate), and announcements. It’s a great idea and I’m sure more apps of its kind will be popping up any day now.

Ticketfly*

Well you didn’t think I’d leave us out, did you? The truth is that Ticketfly offers more tools for venues to build their online brand than any other ticketer. We build fully-integrated, social-friendly websites, emails, iPhone apps + a seamless mobile purchase, and purchase pages that match a venue’s brand. We’re one of the only ticketers using Facebook Connect for purchase, and our Amplifier makes it easy to build content-rich events in one single place and send those events to Facebook, Twitter, affiliate sites, your branded website, and more! Check us out.

*All opinions expressed above were completely unbiased, based on my experience. This section is just facts.