Take your friends along: Disney puts tickets on Facebook site

The Walt Disney Company has created what it believes is a first-of-its-kind application allowing Facebook users to buy tickets to Toy Story 3 without leaving the social networking site and while, at the same time, prodding their friends to come along.

The Walt Disney Company has created what it believes is a first-of-its-kind application allowing Facebook users to buy tickets to Toy Story 3 without leaving the social networking site and while, at the same time, prodding their friends to come along.

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The application, called Disney Tickets Together, could transform how Hollywood sells movie tickets by combining purchases with the powerful forces of social networking. When you buy a ticket through Disney’s application, for instance, it alerts your Facebook friends and prompts you to invite them to buy tickets of their own.

Disney quietly introduced the service on May 26 with a simple post on the site’s official Toy Story 3 page, which has over 732,000 followers. While many theaters will not make tickets available for the film, which was made by Disney’s Pixar unit, for another week — its release date is June 18 — early results indicate that people are using the application to buy tickets in groups as large as 80, according to Disney.

“The whole idea is that no friend gets left behind,” said Oliver Luckett, senior vice president and general manager of DigiSynd, a Disney subsidiary that manages the entertainment giant’s social networking presence.

Disney Tickets Together, which has been in development for months, works with ticket-buying sites like Fandango.com and covers the majority of the movie theaters in North America, Luckett said.

Facebook receives no percentage of the ticket sales but does, in theory, get more visitors on its site.