Ticket search engine FanSnap, which last year signed a ground-breaking partnership deal with Microsoft’s general search engine Bing, soft-launched a new Facebook app this week that looks to leverage the leading social network’s “F-commerce” capabilities.
F-commerce, or Facebook commerce, is the new phrase to describe the social network’s version of e-commerce, which utilizes the power of a user’s network of friends to market products, create buzz and drive sales. The FanSnap app, which is available on company’s Facebook fan page allows users to notify friends of events they plan on attending.
In addition, the app uses interactive seat maps to let a user’s friends know exactly where they are sitting and shows offers for seats nearby that friends can click on and purchase tickets from brokers who have the seats. That level of functionality helps set the FanSnap app apart from a lot of its competitors.
“Instead of looking for tickets to an event and then telling your friends about it, this takes a more social, or friends-centric, approach,” FanSnap director Christrian Anderson told TicketNews. “This wants to be viral, because you go to events with your friends.”
The company’s Facebook app shows a user’s “Likes,” and takes that information to show the user’s friends what they’re up to. The friend can then click on the event, see which friends are going and where they’re sitting and decide to go, too. At this point, the app helps play to a broker’s advantage because they have inventory everywhere and a friend can find seats close to them. Ticketmaster or the box office might have tickets, too, but depending on the event it could be sold out. On the secondary ticket market events are never really sold out.
“This is beyond just showing someone’s ‘Likes,'” Anderson said. “This is leveraging those ‘Likes’ for something more. People often say they would have bought tickets to something had they known about it, or knew their friends were going. This does that but lets them also find tickets near their friends. What we found interesting is how that interaction works in the social environment, not just through search.”
FanSnap is not the first player in the ticketing space to look to Facebook to help spur growth and boost revenues. Many ticket brokers, venues and others have launched their own Facebook fan pages and apps to help facilitate ticket sales, such as TicketForce, which has a Facebook app, and TicketBiscuit, which has a Facebook app that allows its clients to sell tickets from their own fan pages. Ticketmaster has also made Facebook a growing part of its business under the direction of the ticketing giant’s hard-charging CEO Nathan Hubbard.
But, where FanSnap is different is that it takes an approach similar to travel site Kayak.com by aggregating ticket broker inventory through deals with all of the major reseller sites so fans can choose the offer that best suits them.
