By adaptive - May 2nd, 2012

[E]ventbrite is an online service that people everywhere use to create, share, and join any event imaginable. Whether it's a photography class with a local artist, or a sold-out concert in a city s...

Eventbrite is an online service that people everywhere use to create, share, and join any event imaginable. Whether it's a photography class with a local artist, or a sold-out concert in a city stadium, Eventbrite makes it happen.

Useful Social Media spoke with Vanessa Hope Schneider, Senior Public Relations Manager, Eventbrite about how social media has become an integral component of Eventbrite's success.

As a corporate user of social networks, how does your company value the networks it has a presence on?

Social media is really important for Eventbrite—both as a brand, and as part of our product offering. One of the ways in which Eventbrite was able to spur early exponential growth in our user base was to be one of the first partners with Facebook, back in 2008. Our founders saw that people were copying event information from Eventbrite events and posting it on their Facebook walls. We wanted to make that process of sharing far easier, and when we integrated Facebook sharing into our platform, growth really took off. Facebook is now the number 1 driver of traffic to our site, which makes sense, because Events are inherently social.

As a brand, our social media presence offers us the chance to provide loads of helpful tips and tricks to help organizers plan truly successful events. It also provides a platform for telling the stories of our customers. We have amazing people doing amazing things through Eventbrite, and we want to tell their stories so that we can inspire the entire community.

Are the social networks now offering corporations tangible commercial opportunities to sell their goods or services?

At Eventbrite, we’re not only interested in how we can use social media channels to connect with our customers—we’re interested in how our customers (event organizers) can leverage social media to promote their events and sell more tickets. That’s why we’ve created 3 Social Commerce studies to date:

Our first study took a look at how each type of sharing that occurs on our platform can translate to additional gross ticket sales for our organizers.

Our second study took a look at how sharing values compare across different types of events; and it took a look at sharing behaviors both pre-purchase and post-purchase.

And our most recent report compared social commerce values in the US to those in the UK.

You are one of the first companies to actually show what social media is worth to your business. Is it now possible to accurately measure the ROI of social media?

We are in a very fortunate position at Eventbrite—it’s a data-rich company, and that places us in a really exciting position to be one of the first companies to publish social commerce data that assigns real dollar values to the sharing behaviors we see on our platform.

What does Eventbrite see as the key challenge across the social media environment with brand awareness and advocacy?

The challenge for anyone is authenticity—I think that spans every vertical and type of business. At Eventbrite, we make sure that everyone who tweets at us gets a response, and that everyone who posts on our Facebook wall hears back from us. No matter how somebody reaches out to Eventbrite, there’s a Briteling on the other end of that conversation, eager to connect.

How does Eventbrite decide what it spends on which social media networks? Does Eventbrite have a social media roadmap it is working to?

We have a Community Manager in the Marketing team who defines and implements our social media strategy. At the end of the day, the Community Manager’s mandate is to engage as broad of a community as is possible, while establishing and reinforcing the Eventbrite voice and sensibility. We want people to get to know us as the encouraging, informative, dependable, and fun company that Eventbrite is!

What’s next for Eventbrite in the social media space? Can you outline any new initiatives you are working on?

We just launched a new design for our blog which we’re very excited about. And of course, we’re always figuring out which social networks would be well-suited for our community—we want to reach as many people as possible!