Evite, EventBrite and Facebook Events

How do you chose to share and post events online? A recent blog entry by Nick O’Neill has me thinking about the opportunities with Facebook events and what it’s competitor’s are offering right now.

Evite has been around a long time, for more than 10 years. They are often top of mind when you think about sending out an invitation online. However the service is geared towards more personal events and they do not offer the ability to collect event payments. But that isn’t stopping people from using the service, Evite boasts 9 MM unique visitors a month according to Compete.com compared to just under 1 MM unique visitors for EventBrite.com.

Evite currently is the most popular online invitation service

On the other hand, EventBrite is quickly becoming the most popular platform to publish your events online and sell tickets. It’s incredibly scalable and works well for small and mid-sized businesses and organizations. With the ability to collect money and RSVP’s it’s a simple platform for one-time or reoccuring events.

EventBrite could certainly make things even more interesting by using the Facebook API to push event information out to your friends and then aggregate the responses as well.

So what could Facebook do to compete? Nick suggests that their tests with micro-payments could be leveraged for a service much like EventBrite. He also suggests that it could become a revenue stream for the company.

It certainly makes sense. If Facebook were ever able to harness it’s reach and provide that sort of service it could compete with EventBrite. One draw back is that Facebook does not allow for customized event invitations. When you compare it to Evite you can see why it would be preferred for a social function but Facebook does allow for the social interactions within your stream, something that you dont’ get with Evite unless you log in.

I’m curious to see if Facebook ever extends the platform to push out SMS updates as reminders, integrate applications, or customize an event with more graphics. Once that is possible, and combined with micro-payments, there wouldn’t be a reason to use anything but Facebook or their API for events.

Google has built loyalty through their service offerings. As a result they control an immense amount of data, especially personal data. Facebook continues to mimic that model and insulate themselves from future competition by giving you reasons to use their service exclusively. This would just be one more reason why.

Dennis Jenders

With nearly 15 years in the field, Dennis Jenders is a digital marketing strategist with significant experience in analytics, design, development, information architecture and market research. Dennis is a founding board member of the Milwaukee Interactive Marketing Association, currently works at Laughlin Constable and is an adjunct professor at Marquette University.

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