How much is a shared link on Facebook worth? For online ticketing service Eventbrite, each time someone shares a link to an event with their Facebook friends it results in $2.52 worth of ticket sales. In contrast, a Twitter share is only worth $0.43, and a LinkedIn share is worth $0.90. Sharing an event through Eventbrite’s email sharing tool is worth $2.34, almost as much as Facebook. On average, across all social channels, each share is worth an average of $1.78 for Eventbrite.
Events are inherently social, and if you know your friends are going to go to an event you are more likely to go as well. Facebook and email most closely match your real friends, so it makes sense that those shares are worth more in this context. But Facebook has an edge because it broadcasts to all your friends. On average, each shared link on Facebook results in 11 new visits to Eventbrite, compared to 7 visits per share across all channels.
As CEO Kevin Hartz told me a couple weeks ago when he raised $20 million, Facebook now sends more traffic to Eventbrite than any other source, including Google. It is no wonder that Eventbrite is making a big push into social discovery, adding more Facebook hooks into its service. The more it can get people to share events, the more tickets it sells.
The big question is whether this phenomenon is particular to Eventbrite, or whether all commerce sites can benefit from social sharing. Companies should start tracking revenue per social share and see where the money is coming from. My gut instinct is that Facebook will be more valuable for products which get a bigger boost when your real friends are using them, and Twitter will compare better for other more general types of products where people are just looking for a trusted recommendation based on topic knowledge. Twitter might also result in better clickthrough rates for pure media sharing (i.e., advertising versus commerce).
What’s your revenue per share? Send me an email or share in comments.
Eventbrite believes that anyone can be an event organizer. That’s why they offer tools that make it easy to sell tickets to all kinds of events whether it’s a photography class or a sold-out concert, an inspiring conference or an air-guitar competition. With Eventbrite, organizers can create a customizable event page; spread the word with social media; collect money; and gain visibility into attendees and sales. Eventbrite is for anyone planning or attending an event. It empowers event organizers to...
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
Created in 2006, Twitter is a global real-time communications platform with 400 million monthly visitors to twitter.com, more than 200 million monthly active users around the world. We see a billion tweets every 2.5 days on every conceivable topic. World leaders, major athletes, star performers, news organizations and entertainment outlets are among the millions of active Twitter accounts through which users can truly get the pulse of the planet.
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