Update: C3 talked with Google about how they use Google Analytics also, if you’re interested in more about the company’s marketing efforts for these events.
Original Article: C3 Presents is the company that books, markets, and produces big concerts like Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits Music Festival among other things. It should be no surprise that social media is a big strategy that C3 uses to get the word out about such events.
C3’s Digital Marketing Director has pointed murdok to the company’s use of Facebook Connect for the Lollapalooza and Austin City Limits Music Festival events. It is having a tremendous impact.
If you are unfamiliar with Lollapalooza and/or the Austin City Limits Music Festivals, we’re talking about some big name artists like Beastie Boys, Kings of Leon, Mos Def, Pearl Jam, the Dave Matthews Band, John Legend, Ben Harper, Jane’s Addiction, Depeche Mode, Tool, The Killers, Snoop Dogg, and TV on the Radio (one of my personal favorites) to name a few. There are many more. This gives you an idea of the size of these events though.
“The integration enables our fans to do something on our lineup pages that has never been possible before: see which bands their friends are planning to watch at the Fest,” C3 Digital Marketing Director Michael Feferman tells murdok. “It has really helped to spur our word of mouth marketing and, in many ways, we think it’s a much more interesting and useful implementation of FB Connect than many that have been announced.”
MySpace has long been a popular social network within the music industry. Artists often preview new albums on the site, for example. When it comes to these concerts, however, MySpace doesn’t generate nearly the engagement of Facebook, or even Twitter or email.
“We’ve surveyed our festival fans to find out what they’re using, and the overwhelming majority are using Facebook ” (We think it’s ~80% for Lollapalooza and ~70% for ACL Festival),” says Feferman. “Nothing else even comes close. MySpace was second at around 40-50%, but the folks on Twitter, even if they might be a much smaller percentage, are more active.”
Feferman tells me that based on C3’s share features, the breakdown is roughly:
– Facebook – 60%
– Twitter – 15%
– Email – 15%
– MySpace – 7%
– Other – 3%
He says that engagement and traffic measures are way up for both festival sites. “The big benefit to us is that people are sharing more stuff about our Fest with their friends, which is good for our business. We can measure both the outbound sharing events and the inbound traffic that they drive – and the results are great.” Since the integration of Facebook Connect and other sharing features:
– Page Views are up 99%
– Pages Per Visit are up 34%
– Average Time Spent on the sites is up 20%.
While it is clear that just enabling sharing features is huge for C3’s sites, Feferman admits that Facebook and Twitter are where the company’s focus is right now. That’s not hard to believe, considering the continued growth of both networks.
