Ticketmaster now lets you tag, sit with your Facebook friends

Ticketmaster has added Facebook integration to its interactive seat maps. The new feature allows you to share your live event plans by tagging yourself into your seat, and thus allowing your Facebook friends to see where you are sitting. If you have already purchased tickets for an event, you can also tag yourself at a later date.

You can select who you want to share your plans with: everyone (default), just your friends, or nobody at all. If you purchased tickets for your friends and tagged them, they will get Facebook notifications asking them if they want to share their seat with their Facebook friends as well.

Sharing your Ticketmaster seat tag on the social network results in a "Check out my seats" post on your Facebook Wall. Along with the mandatory Comment and Like buttons, there is also a convenient Buy Tickets button.

The idea is simple: once your friends know which seats you purchased, they can then check to see if seats near you are available for purchase. On the other hand, they can make a point not to buy tickets anywhere near you.

Ticketmaster says more than 9,000 interactive seat maps are available on Ticketmaster.com and LiveNation.com. Ticketmaster first rolled out interactive seat maps last year, and it's being used in more than 300 venues. The company hopes that Facebook integration will create a community around each live event that begins with the sale of tickets and builds through the live event.

"Ticketmaster is taking an important step toward making every stage of the live event experience as social online as it is in real life," David Fisch of Facebook said in a statement. "Ticketmaster's interactive seat map shows the promise of using social technologies to improve the event experience."

"Live events are inherently social and leveraging social media to enhance them allows the passion to exist in the digital space before, during and after live events," Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard said in a statement. "Our team is fanatical about leading the industry forward and we will continue to innovate the live experience."

See also:

• Miramax starts offering movies on Facebook
• Universal starts offering movies to rent on Facebook
• Facebook wants to make TV more social
• Paramount offers tickets for Transformers 3 on Facebook
• Facebook adds Netflix CEO to board of directors
• Warner Bros. starts offering movies on Facebook
• Warner Bros. offers five more movies on Facebook
• Sony considering movie distribution on Facebook