Follower Counts Don't Sell Tickets

Kelli Nardis

— 2 min read
Follower Counts Don't Sell Tickets

From the moment we launched Punchup, we have heard comedians citing their social media follower counts and explosive growth (or stagnation) on various platforms.  We’ve also been watching where fans are coming from when they land at Punchup, and who is buying tickets.  We’ve noticed that follower counts don’t correlate with tickets sold, and wanted to take a deeper look.

We looked at link click data for over 75 comedians on Punchup from January - July.  As our comedians tend to cross-post across social platforms, we assumed that the percentage of total ticket clicks from those sites would reflect their various follower counts, which often vary wildly.  

Our expectation was that ticket clicks would look like the below chart - where our comedians have similarly large follower counts on TikTok and Instagram, followed by Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. 

We expected our Ticket Click Referrers to look like the above chart, which is reflective of our comedians' follower counts across the platforms during the observed time period.


While our expectation was the chart above, based on follower counts … our data has consistently shown us that Instagram far outperforms TikTok and other social platforms in driving ticket sales.  For comparison, we’ve left our expectation in gray in the chart below, and added actual percentages of ticket link referrals in orange.

This chart represents our expectation based on follower counts (in grey) and how we actually see ticket clicks as referred from the Social Sites (in orange). Instagram is the primary referrer.

While comedians on Punchup have had a similar following across TikTok and Instagram, Instagram has driven 10 times more ticket link clicks than TikTok.  We have some hypotheses as to why this is, which we plan on testing in the coming months. 

In the meantime, for comedians looking to maximize their tickets sold through social media, we recommend:

  • Always having a live ticket link available where available. Stories are where known fans are, so it’s imperative to make it easy to click and buy.  Ensure that posts from Instagram also flow to Facebook for maximum potential reach.
  • Posting consistently and authentically across platforms.  While we saw outsize performance from Instagram, we still see value in posting across all platforms, as audiences do differ. With consistent posting, Punchup can help comedians learn which days and which platforms perform better in driving ticket sales, and develop customized strategies to maximize results.
  • Using one consistent destination across your media.  Make it easy for fans - point all links to one place.  We obviously like Punchup as a fan destination for content (and tickets!) because we are then better able to optimize ticket sales.

We have many more questions to answer - stay tuned for more data-driven insights behind the business of comedy.  If there’s a question you’d like us to answer, reach out at hello@punchup.live.

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