Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook are becoming increasingly strong marketing platforms, and, eventually, we should start to see more metrics that show how effective all those likes, shares and RT’s really are for businesses. (There are still precious few.)
One company that’s gotten an early start on that is Eventbrite, the online ticketing site, which today publishes some numbers that point to which social networks are giving it the best returns across its operations in the U.S. and UK.
The company says that Facebook is the king of all social networks when it comes to ticket sales. In the UK, if a person shares an event on Facebook, it generates an average of £2.25 ($3.60) in additional gross ticket sales. A share on Twitter, meanwhile, drives an average of £1.80 ($2.90), and an event shared on LinkedIn generates an average of £1.24 ($1.99) in additional event revenue.
In the U.S., Facebook actually generates even more revenue than in the UK, at $4.13, but Twitter’s impact is much smaller — and even less so LinkedIn, at $1.94 and $0.75 respectively.
However, when you think about it, any one of those is an astounding metric, considering that every single one of those bits of marketing are essentially free.
Eventbrite notes that at the moment Facebook is also the biggest driver of traffic to Eventbrite, bigger than Google, in both the U.S. and UK. Just in terms of scale, this is not too much of a surprise, since Facebook has the highest penetration of all three — with about 50 percent of the populations of both countries registered on the social network.
Eventbrite’s reason for why Facebook is bringing in more sales, however, is more specific to how Facebook is actually used: “The connections we have on Facebook most closely represent the people we actually know and spend time with offline,” its researchers write.
The company says that on average tickets in the UK cost about 36 percent more than they do in the U.S., but the “social commerce value” per share is only 24 percent higher in the UK than the U.S. Effectively what that means is that the U.S. is providing a slightly better social bang for the buck than the UK — or “social commerce ratio” as Eventbrite calls it. Specifically it’s .035 in the U.S. and .032 in the UK.
However, as you can see by the revenue distribution above, there seems to be a better opportunity in the UK in terms of spreading bets across different social networks when attempting a viral marketing play. Specifically, Eventbrite says that Facebook shares in the US are 56 percent more “impactful”, while Twitter is almost 10 percent more impactful in the UK than the U.S., and LinkedIn is a surprising 95 percent more impactful in the UK than in the U.S.
[Image: Planetschwa on Flickr]