Mashable Expands Content With Events Board

New portal streamlines content aggregation targeted at event planners and seekers.

By T.J. Raphael
Tuesday, May 1, 2012

With events making up roughly 40 percent of b-to-b budgets it’s no surprise that media giant Mashable wants to tap in to that market even further. The company is enhancing content offerings with the launch of its newly created Events Board (pictured), which is aimed at courting event planners and seekers. This move, says Mashable, is a result of heightened interest in event related content.

“We have over 20 million unique visitors that read Mashable every month, and a reach of about 6 million across various social accounts,” says Brian Dresher, vice president of business development for Mashable. “While I can’t provide an exact estimate of the number of event planners that are reading us, I can say that when we publish posts about event planning they are among some of our most engaging reads and most shared items.”

One example Dresher provides in regards to event content popularity is a post from early April entitled, “3 Ways Events Can Enhance Your Brand’s Online Presence.”

“We have an active share count that complements every post on our site and that post got about 2,000 shares across social accounts,” he says. “As you can imagine, having been shared to different social networks that many times—and we are amongst the most shared brand once we are Tweeted or Facebooked out—it certainly drove a lot of engagement back to the original post, in addition to its original consumption.”

Before this new Events Board, Mashable was publishing a weekly events blog that aggregated the top 100 to 120 events across various industries around the globe. 

“The challenge was that it was very resource intensive on our side to be able to compile this information and work back and forth with different event organizers to get the piece ready,” says Dresher. “It wasn’t as user friendly as you might imagine—scrolling, somewhat endlessly, without some filter sorting features that we now have with the Events Board.”

With the new Events Boards users can now search for events by industry category, country, location and time period. Planners interested in promoting meetings, events and conferences can upload a description of their event, include a link to a website, a Google Map’s image of the venue location, and contact information for prospective attendees and sponsors. Each Events Board post is also enabled for sharing across several social media platforms. The price for a basic listing is $299, a highlighted event listing is $399 and a featured event listing goes for $599. So far, over 70 events have been listed in the month since its launch.

Highlighted events allow for an event to not only be listed on the Events Board, but the listing can be placed in the “highlighted events" area for a timeframe selected by the lister that will aid in maximum exposure. This area displays listings on the Events Board landing page, with a maximum of 8 events rotated at the same time in this “highlighted events” position. A “featured event” also lists an event on the Mashable Events Board up to the last day of an event, but the event is also featured for a select period of time, based on the lister's preferences, in a more prominently displayed "featured event" spot, with a maximum of 3 events rotated in this position. Unlike many job boards, says Dresher, the Mashable Events Board allows listings for several months and not just a 30-day period.

“The new events board is much more self serving, automated and includes so many more promotional levers,” says Dresher. “We really think we’ve done a great job here with connecting audiences both online and offline. We actually have our Mashable Connect Conference in Orlando, which supports that goal. This events board has created yet another way to let our own community connect online through the Events Board so they can connect offline at events. It has certainly been off to a great start.”

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