How Twitter Helps Sell Movie Tickets

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Jul 25, 6:33AM EDT

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At a time when the movie theater business is in jeopardy because more and more people stream premium video into their homes, an equally powerful new generation technology may help these traditional outlets to sell tickets. Twitter Inc. (NYSE: TWTR) claims its social media service helps sell movie tickets.

In a recent blog post, Jennifer Prince, Twitter’s Industry Director, Entertainment, wrote:

To find out more about the role Twitter plays in movie viewing decisions, we partnered with Nielsen to conduct an exit poll of U.S. moviegoers age 13 and over who had just seen one of four big summer films on opening weekend. We found that compared to non-users, Twitter users are real film buffs. They see more movies and are more likely to head to a movie when it first opens. Furthermore, when it comes to picking movies, what they see on Twitter influences their choices.

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She then listed three specific ways the service can help theater operators and gave tips about how to exploit each one. Theaters should take to Twitter months before movies are released to create buzz. Twitter content often causes people to watch trailers, which could affect future ticket sales. And Twitter users provide movie recommendations, which also could help box office sales.

Twitter did not release the data because they are good reading. The micro-blogging site continues to struggle to prove to Wall Street it has some means to make a great deal of money and garner revenue. While Twitter reported revenue of $250 million in the first quarter, up from $114 million in the same period the year before, the company lost $132 million. Twitter management further reported that $126 million of this loss was stock-based compensation.

In addition to the financial portion of the quarterly numbers, Twitter reported two other pieces of news investors did not like. “Average monthly active users” were 255 million for the period, but this was up only 25% over the same quarter a year ago. Twitter’s hyper-growth rate is slowing. And the company reported that revenue in the second quarter would be only $270 million to $280 million, a very small amount of sequential quarterly growth.

Investors have driven down Twitter’s stock price, which recently traded below $29, down from a 52-week high of $74.73.

Twitter needs to do everything it can to justify how it can be part of the e-commerce system that helps a large number of brick-and-mortar companies to improve sales. Its movie survey is a very modest contribution to proving that case.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.