News

Facebook ticket sales fare well

Facebook has become the portal through which to connect to everyone, and now, everything on the Internet. The social media site recently began selling tickets for many different events, from movies to local fairs to concert series.

Close to home, the Puyallup Fair has also taken hold of this Facebook ticketing idea and is currently selling tickets for its Concert Series.

To use the service, you must add the “Puyallup Fair” application, but once added, you can choose to buy a variety of tickets for concerts held at the Fairgrounds during its off-season.

Concerts include Chicago with the Tacoma Symphony, Big & Rich with Gretchen Wilson and Larry the Cable Guy. As of now, tickets for the actual Fair in the fall are not for sale.

The process to buy the Concert Series tickets is similar to buying tickets on Ticketmaster.com, but there is not a service charge.

Once you add the Fair application and choose the concert you wish to attend, you are given a layout of the stadium and can choose what seats you want.

From here, you are directed to a page where you enter your payment information. And if you choose to print them at home, there is not a shipping charge.

The idea was first introduced in June, when Toy Story 3 was released in theaters. Disney developed a Facebook application that allowed Facebook users to not only order tickets for themselves but to invite their friends along.

The application is called “Tickets Together” and works like Fandango.com, but again, without the service charge.

Once you add the “Tickets Together” application, you select the movie you want to see, the date and time you want to see it at and then you can choose the friends you want to invite.

It is comparable to creating a Facebook event and will show up on your newsfeed after you create the event.

“The whole idea is that no friend gets left behind,” Oliver Luckett, senior vice president and general manager of DigiSynd, a Disney subsidiary that manages the entertainment giant’s social networking presence said in a New York Times article about the recent trend to sell tickets on Facebook.

Student Heather Martonik calls Puyallup home and was surprised to learn the Fair was selling tickets on Facebook.

“It seems weird that the Fair is selling tickets on Facebook, since it is not a very big deal,” Martonik said.

Martonik also said that she didn’t even know the Fairgrounds did off-season concerts so “it makes sense that they are selling Facebook tickets to make people more aware and up the attendance.”