9th
Invite Friends!
When you buy tickets on BuyPlayTix you’ll now see a link on your receipt page to “Invite Friends!” This will share the fact that you bought tickets on Facebook and let your friends buy them too. It should ensure your patrons don’t have to sit alone and that you take more tickets. There’s also a new Link Share Report that reports on how many times each link has been shared, commented, liked, etc.
But in the process I beat my head against the wall quite a lot, so I’d like to share in case you would like to share a link on Facebook. These are quick and dirty instructions, there are a lot more options you can read about here.
So let’s say I want to share a link like http://www.hydeparktheatre.org (they have a great show going on right now called “Body Awareness”).
I’d put the link in my page using the following HTML:
<a name="fb_share" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php"> Invite Friends! </a> <script src="http://static.ak.fbcdn.net/connect.php/js/FB.Share" type="text/javascript"></script>
That does a fine job of creating a button and popping up a link, but if you want to share more than just a link you’ll need to adjust the meta tags in the page you’re linking to (in this case http://www.hydeparktheatre.org). Inside of the <head> tags you need to add something like this:
<meta name="title" content="Come see 'Body Awareness' with me!" />
<meta name="description" content="I just bought tickets to see 'Body Awareness'. Join me!" />
<link rel="image_src" href="http://www.hydeparktheatre.org/site/images/hydeparkLogo2sm.gif" />
And that’s it! When they share it on facebook they’ll see something like this:
Come see ‘Body Awareness’ with me!www.hydeparktheatre.orgI just bought tickets to go see ‘Body Awareness’. Join me!
2 hours ago · Comment · · Share
If you want to find out how many people are sharing your link you can get stats by going to:
http://api.facebook.com/restserver.php?method=links.getStats&urls=http://www.hydeparktheatre.org
BuyPlayTix goes one step further and adds the correct date so your friend and you end up at the same show. But that significantly increases the complexity of the exercise.
Have fun sharing!
