Wen 丨 Music Pioneer, Author 丨 Echo, Lu Xiuxiu, Editor 丨 Fan Zhihui
On Feb. 16, social software Snapchat announced a partnership with Ticketmaster, the world's largest ticketing platform, to launch a new feature to discover nearby gigs. Simply go to the Ticketmaster layer in Snap Map and users can browse upcoming shows nearby and see other people interested in the same show, or invite friends to join them.
Snapchat describes the new features: "Once users find a show they're interested in, they can invite their friends directly, or even buy tickets directly through a seamless checkout process." By "seamless" here, users can go directly to the Ticketmaster website to buy tickets via a link on Snapchat.
It is reported that Snapchat is not the first social platform that Ticketmaster has set foot in, and has successively reached cooperation with Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook since 2015. Through the cooperation with Snapchat, Ticketmaster will obtain a more complete audience portrait and interest map, which is undoubtedly a further deepening of its ticketing + social strategy.
As it firmly believes, "social platforms are where ticketing is precisely positioned."
Real-time targeting, seamless purchasing, precision marketing, how can the world's largest ticketing platform leverage social networking?
Snapchat is a "burn after reading" photo sharing app developed by two Stanford University students, which has rapidly risen in the overseas youth market since its launch in 2011, with high coverage. According to statistics, as of September 2021, Snapchat has more than 306 million daily active users worldwide, more than 500 million monthly active users, and users send an average of up to 5 billion Snaps per day, which is very sticky.
In 2017, Snapchat launched Snap Map, a location sharing feature that allows users to not only view their friends' location and current status, but also share their own stories on the global community and browse the stories of users in other regions. At the time, Snapchat called the feature a "personalized way to see and explore the world."
As Snap Map continues to iterate, Snapchat has also added layer functionality to the map. The collaboration with Ticketmaster is carried out through a dedicated "Explore Events" layer. As you can see, in this layer, users can view nearby performances in real time, browse recommended content through Snapchat's unique sliding method, and invite others to watch the performance together.
In the chat function, Snapchat also adapted. By clicking on the rocket icon on the right side of the chat area, users can access the newly launched third-party mini program Ticketmatcher Mini, in which each user's viewing interests and preferences will be displayed after a short questionnaire.
With the Ticketmatcher Mini, users can see if their friends have the same intentions as themselves, and they can invite friends to participate in the event. If they agree, they can purchase tickets directly from the link below the gig's interface to the Ticketmaster website.
Since its inception, unlike other social platforms that are keen on expanding their audience and increasing their exposure, Snapchat has focused more on building close connections between users and expanding the platform's influence through user fission. This cooperation with Ticketmaster allows users to find peers in a vertical audience and a wide variety of live performances, which is also based on this concept.
It is worth mentioning that in addition to the routine operations of seamless purchase and precision marketing, this cooperation has enhanced the scene attributes of the social performance through the functions of real-time positioning and map list in the unique "Explore Events" layer, and built a new music consumption scene that can be imagined.
For Ticketmaster, as the offline performance market is gradually recovering, from online sharing to offline activities in the new social network, the ticketing giant naturally expects the in-depth combination of social + ticketing to add a fire to the live performance.
Ticket marketing gameplay in domestic and foreign social scenes
Before Snapchat, Ticketmaster's borrowing power on social platforms was mostly focused on the huge user base on social platforms, and through promotion, it helped fans establish contact with event organizers to achieve the effect of "casting a wide net and collecting more fish".
In 2015, Ticketmaste began to test the waters of social platforms and received good feedback on Twitter; the following year, Ticketmaster further increased its size and reached a cooperation with Facebook, the world's largest social platform, to achieve seamless ticket purchase. In this partnership, Facebook also used its unique advertising platform to improve the exposure and accuracy of Ticketmaster ticket purchase links.
For Ticketmaster, these social platforms with a large number of daily active users not only provide the best channel to reach potential audiences, but their massive social user data can also help enhance the rationality of ticket marketing strategies.
This way of playing Ticketmaster is in line with the operational strategy of Ticketfly, the ticketing platform that first received help from the social revolution.
In order to enable event promoters to establish and promote themselves, Ticketfly has launched a series of features that allow organizers to create brand websites, email communications, etc. for social media marketing, becoming the world's first ticketing platform that fully integrates social attributes. Through the platform's unique affiliate network and fan base, campaign promoters can also pay close attention to and quickly respond to audience needs.
In 2017, after Ticketfly was acquired by ticketing giant Eventbrite, Eventbrite integrated the advantages of Ticketfly and Eventbrite, and in 2019, it integrated the launch of Eventbrite Music, an online ticketing solution in the era of ticketing 3.0. This makes the connection between the organizer and the audience closer, and also achieves more scientific quantitative monitoring.
On the basis of Ticketfly's original functions, Eventbrite Music further provides functions such as data analysis and customized reports, and also simplifies the ticket purchase process of the client through the open payment API. Through the two-step payment function opened on platforms such as Instagram and Bandsintown, every smartphone has been converted into a mobile ticket gate.
Compared with Eventbrite Music to establish more and closer social marketing ideas between organizers and fans, the cooperation between Ticketmaster and Snapchat mentioned above is more focused on discovering the same performances among users and expanding the influence of performances in the social communication fission, which can be said to be a more veritable social + ticketing performance marketing model.
In China, the exploration of major ticketing platforms has given the "social + ticketing" model more interpretation methods.
Taking Xiudong, which occupies the highest market share in China, as an example, it is positioned as a social platform for live performances, and social services serve ticket sales. In the Xiudong client, there is a "discovery" section that focuses on social networking, where users can not only share their viewing experience with others through "recording the scene", but also communicate with their peers in the interactive group of performances. In the video column, Xiudong provides live videos of various performances, and opens the bullet screen and comment functions, which realizes the drainage of performance activities in various social scenes.
Statistics on social-related functions of major domestic ticketing platforms
Compared with the main ticket sales services such as on-site and show- and so on, the start-up ticketing company "Empathy" is more focused on stimulating the potential of social elements in tapping the value of live music. In the Same Sense App, there is a special "about the scene" function, users can post their own dating declarations in the square, and invite others to participate in their own viewing plans. At present, Tonggan is more oriented to the independent music market, and potential users are more segmented, which can fully meet the desire of niche music fans to find the same good through the music scene, but this also invisibly makes the expansion of its user base face many problems.
In fact, not only the same feeling, limited by performance resources, channel dispersion and even the epidemic, the current domestic ticketing platform generally has the problem of small user scale and low retention rate, whether it is focusing on social or ticketing, the operation mode of ticketing + social is still difficult to form a scale in China. In contrast, continuing to go deeper into social platforms may be a better option.
However, for ticketing websites, organizers and artists, it is not easy to promote performances on Weibo, often facing restrictions such as advertising restrictions and link jumping. At present, it seems that WeChat video number may be a good channel, and its unique "friends" section can not only give full play to the communication advantages of the Social Chain of WeChat friends, but also enhance the online appeal of the music scene in the form of vision, driving more people to the music scene.
A while ago, the energy of the WeChat video number on the live broadcast of the performance amazed the market. According to the WeChat video account team, last year, the number of online viewers of the West Side Boys Concert exceeded 20 million, and the highest number of online people reached 1.5 million, after the "Strawberry Ranger" video line performance event hosted by Modern Sky also achieved good results. In the word of mouth among WeChat friends, these performances have both received extremely high views and a significantly higher proportion of interactions than other social platforms.
At present, ticketing + social networking is actually promising, on the one hand, thanks to the accurate distribution of algorithms under the integration of data and social networking; on the other hand, from discovery, consumption, performance to social networking, the immersive connection of each link will also greatly improve the viewing experience of ticket buyers.
Can "social + ticketing" add a fire to the live performance?
After the epidemic stabilized, the domestic performance market ushered in explosive growth.
"2021 May Day Performance Observation" shows that the Livehouse box office increased by 448% during the May Day period compared with the same period in 2019, and the number of performances increased by 326%. At the same time, the foreign performance market is also recovering rapidly, according to statistics company statista predicts that the global music performance market revenue will return to the pre-epidemic level in 2022, and is expected to grow to more than $30 billion by 2025.
With the gradual liberalization of global epidemic control measures, the rapid growth of the performance market is quite partly due to people's social needs. The innovation of the social + ticketing model by Ticketmaster and Snapchat is precisely based on social networking as the core, which captures the emotional connection needs of the audience.
Of course, for Ticketmaster, which processes billions of transactions every day, and Snapchat, which has more than 300 million daily active users, there is undoubtedly a unique advantage to making such an attempt.
However, in China, this innovative model of social + ticketing may still be ahead of its time. Launched in 2013, Pogo watching performances is the earliest ticketing platform in China to pay attention to the relationship between users and performances, users and users, trying to create a "Douban" and "Momo" around rock fans, but many "niche" factors lean in, Pogo watching performances still failed to achieve a breakthrough through social networking.
It can be seen that for those many ticketing social platforms that have not yet formed a scale and focus on niche performances, it is first necessary to achieve the "original accumulation" of the audience through cooperation with social platforms and music streaming media, and improve the retention rate of users in the improvement of service facilities and the optimization of social experience.
Of course, the linkage between ticketing platforms and streaming platforms is also of great significance, and in the early cooperation of Ticketmaster, there is no shortage of music streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music - through the user portraits on the platform, ticketing platforms can change their sales strategies at any time. Especially in the context of many streaming media platforms have made efforts to promote the music community, it is also good for the ticketing market.
It is foreseeable that in the era of entertainment with the "experience economy" as the mainstream, the consumption form that fully combines social networking and ticketing still has more untapped potential, driving live performances to a new level.