The Facebook Yes

How much is a Facebook Event Attending worth in real butts-in-seats terms? With advance ticket sales rarer than ever, perhaps you find yourself (as I often do) refreshing your Event, hoping to see those precious number rise. But is a Yes on Facebook equal to a Yes in life?

Though not big/wide enough for a real representative sample, Jacob’s House and The Lesser Seductions of History make for an interesting example. Produced within months of each other, with similar artistic teams, they suggest maybe there is a predictable correlation.

Jacob’s House had 160 Yeses on the Facebook Event, and 502 real audience members, making each Facebook Yes predict 3.1375 actual peeps.

The Lesser Seductions of History had 217 Yeses on the Facebook Event, and 644 real audience Members, for a 2.9677 ratio.

Looking at it from another angle, TLSOH had 28% more ticket sales, and 35% more Facebook attendees, that JH. These numbers are close enough to make me wonder if there is some general average for theatres using Facebook events; though it’s more likely that these ratios are Flux-specific, as we use a lot of social media, have no marketing budget and relatively small email list.

A potentially more interesting question is how many Yeses actually do attend; I may parse that at a later date. Are you more likely to attend after RSVPing on Facebook?

If you take the average of 3.0526 and apply it to our current 102 Dog Act Facebook RSVPs, we can expect an audience of 311 if we opened tonight – and this play deserves a much larger audience than that (I’ve loved it for nearly 10 years!)

So why not grab your $12 discount tickets for opening weekend (and the 8th!) with the code SQUISH here? Or, if you’re not quite ready to seal the deal but want to show us nervous producer types you’re coming, you could always…you know.

How does Facebook impact your theatre going or making? Do you notice a similar ratio of Facebook Attendee to audience member in your own work? Are you more or less likely to attend if you’ve promised on the World Wide Web? Or are you planning to egg the next Facebook event that steps on your lawn?