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Local SEO with Event Promotion by Paul O’Brien is a very interesting articles talking about how local busines can use local events to promote and advertise their own business. This is not a new concept but Zvents, now gives the local small business a way to do it on-line.
“Zvents is the local search engine for discovering things to do by connecting people with their favorite interests and events (concerts, fairs, conferences, shopping, sports, etc.). You can search for events, venues, movies, restaurants, or performers. The platform enables businesses to freely add, share, and promote event information which Zvents structures, normalizes, and optimizes, in turn getting events heavily promoted on Google and Yahoo.”
After reading the article, I contacted Paul with a few followup questions. I recommend you read the article over at Top Rank Online Marketing Blog before proceeding.
Q. Tell us about your new Zvents Facebook application.
A. As the only search engine for things to do, Zvents, we look to social networks as an extension of our network. We want to encourage our audience to use the social platform they prefer while dscovering events, activities, and places to go through Zvents. Our app is an extension of that idea; unfortunately, limited by Facebook. The Zvents ap quite literally puts events on the map; users installing the app get a map centralized to their location added to their profile which automatically updates with local things to do. Search within the app and find everything from community fairs to retailer sales, local concerts to performing arts.
Facebook unfortunately prevents access to their event calendaring feature ‘Facebook Events’ so we can’t enable our users to really use Facebook; ideally, users could push things discovered on Zvents directly into Facebook Events so they can invite friends and share the details. While restricted, we’re still having more fun that should be allowed with the Zvents app. Zoom out to see the entire U.S., do a search for someone like Maroon 5 and Zvents plots their entire concert tour. Zoom in to your neighborhood and perhaps discover a town fair, community dance class, or book signing at the town book store.
Q. On the Zvents website it speaks about Zvents Media Platform as “the local events solution for local media and publishers”-can elaborate on this?
A. The Zvents Media Platform is a unique local search experience for websites; it is the only platform of its kind allowing any website to add a local search experience promoting events, restaurants, movies, and venues (places to go). As a cobranded experience, Zvents hosts the entire platform on behalf of partners requiring only that they point their sub-domains, add a brand, and personalize the css to go live. The solution is so turn-key it can go live almost overnight. Triangle.comin the south east part of the United States is a beautiful integration as is LA.com.
Aggregating events, as you can imagine, is exceptionally difficult and only Zvents’ search technology crawls the open web to literally index events as Google would a web page. That gives Zvents unique listings with much more than what you can get from Ticket Master or manually through user submitted content. What this means for publishers is exponentially more traffic due to the millions of unique events, business listings, and entertainment pages we can add to their site. Besides the industry leading local search technology which gives users highly relevant local results unmatched by anyone in this regard.
What this means for marketers though is where it really gets interesting. Zvents is a network over hundreds of media partners reaching 3 million unique users every month. The network is growing 30-50% every month meaning small businesses can get unparalleled local reach with one submission to Zvents.com. Promote a sale, in-store event, lecture series, conference, or concert through Zvents or any of the media partners and it gets syndicated to everyone else.
Come back tomorrow for the exciting conclusion….
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