Movie ticketing app Fandango is targeting Facebook Messenger and other messaging apps as a core focus for its social media strategy.
Neil Ishibashi, the company’s senior director of design and development, said the Facebook service will be at the heart of an expected messaging boom in the coming years.
Fandango introduced its Messenger chatbot earlier this year, with the service providing prompts for moviegoers to locate nearby theatres, showing trailers and giving direct access to advance ticketing.
And while the Fandango app has more than 100 million app downloads itself, Ishibashi said that social platforms like Facebook represent a tremendous opportunity to identify how users are engaging with movies, not just the brand.
“We want to leverage what the capabilities are of these very high-engagement platforms,” he told the VentureBeat website. “The message conversation is where people start to plan: What they want to see, getting others involved, and doing their planning and organisation through messaging.
“It doesn’t make sense to keep everybody in our owned and operated space when we can push out to the places where the conversations are naturally happening.”
Ishibashi added that while the Fandango bot is still in its infancy, simply being part of the messaging wave at this stage is essential.
“It is a relatively new way of introducing our business, with the high level of contextual relevancy that Facebook can offer to its users,” he said. “It’s a new way of thinking about advertising and marketing, and how that actually increases engagement.”
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