Liveblogging helps companies to generate a high-quality content experience that widens their audience and increases true engagement in real-time. It is the right tool to empower the ownership of audiences, automate content distribution, and boost revenue.
In today’s breaking news cycle, there’s no room for being slow and buggy. More than ever, people want to know what’s going on as soon as occurrences take place. Besides, physical space is no longer a barrier. Immediacy and urgency must be answered with instant involvement, no matter where people are. That means that, if you’re making your audience wait, you’re in trouble.
If your company provides any type of content in this fast and ever-changing environment, you already know what’s obvious: in order to make readers spend more time on your website, you need to be relevant and deliver news in a more dynamic way.
And that is why your company should have a live blog strategy.
What is a Live Blog?
A live blog is a customer engagement platform that allows companies to bring together different forms of content to create high-quality and real-time experiences to their audience. This kind of platform makes it possible to embed videos, images, texts, and audios from live streaming and social media channels into short blog posts to involve readers in events that matter to them.
By having a live blog strategy in our current on-the-go environment, organizations can use a smart variety of tools and sources to cover a particular event and engage users that are watching remotely.
Watching isn’t everything users do, though, and that is the cherry on top. Live blog followers can actually feed the stream with their comments and reactions. They can interact with other people, including those who are airing the event – journalists, reporters, expert commentators, or public figures that shed light on their topics of interest.
This makes a live blog experience highly personalized and interactive, and very different from television linear-watching or outdated written posts.
In a nutshell, live blogging is to broadcast real-time occurrences through short, simple, more frequent, and efficient posts, whatever the channel they’re in.
Sneak a peek at how companies have been using live blogs through the ages.
In order to broadcast conferences, technology companies started live blogging in the 2000s. Since then, it has become a popular and essential way for journalistic platforms to provide information on digital channels chronologically, keeping people updated. The Guardian itself has said that live blogging has transformed journalism.
Nowadays, companies from different cores and departments are using live blog to engross their content strategies. From sporting events to elections, from protests to music festivals, live blogging is already a reality when it comes to event coverage.
Why Live Blog?
As much as people currently spend more time engaging with highlights on social media, their thirst isn’t easily quenched by scrolling feeds on Instagram and reading breaking news on Twitter. Social media and traditional blogging aren’t enough to genuinely engage audiences anymore.
Instead of simply reading the news and watching videos to absorb information, people want to live experiences and be part of them, even if they are sitting in their living room or working at the office.
In this context, a live blog strategy helps organizations to reach wider audiences and build authority towards topics they are interested in. It matches what customers are looking for: simplicity and easy access, all in a single place.
Consider this: you’re covering an important event and are about to live blog an exclusive interview with a popular figure in your niche. As soon as you broadcast, your readers will watch it in real time, send their questions, and discuss the interview with each other.
As you post a great news-driven package with videos, texts, and more regarding the occurrence, not only you’re giving your readers a glimpse; most importantly, you’re giving them the chance to live the experience with you.
By allowing your audience access to discuss and witness all the real-time content you’re providing, you drive conversation and traffic to your website and create a sense of community for people who are watching. If they have a good experience keeping track of a live event on your blog, they will see it as the go-to place to get useful content. Eventually, they will come back to check what’s new.
Besides helping you to establish authority as a reliable source of information, a live blog strategy boosts your audience. And, as you already know, an engaged audience is more likely to stay on your website longer.
Academic researches show that people all around the globe are growing supportive of live blogging. Plus, they make it clear that live blogs are here to stay. A survey conducted by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, in 2013, found out that readers like live blogs better than static content they can’t interact with – not to mention survey takers also believe real-time live coverage to be more reasonable and neutral than written posts.
The Internet has made it easy for any company to broadcast important moments and stories to update and engage customers. That being said, live blogging is a huge opportunity for big, medium, and small-sized companies to give their audiences original and meaningful content while attracting and engrossing the public.
A live blog also has the potential to empower your company’s editors and optimize editorial work. Two people may live blog simultaneously, communicating with each other and taking online interaction to a new level.
With so much information being published every second, every day, your editors better have a concise publishing tool to bring data together and widen discussions, letting users engage with their posts.
There is so much untapped potential that can be taken advantage of by a live blog strategy, especially in the pandemic context we are witnessing. It represents an evolution in digital communication strategies and its power is evident, from politics and business to fashion and music.
Now that you know the importance of live blogging, let’s get a little more in-depth on how to use it for your content strategy.
Using Live Blog for your content strategy
When done right and smoothly, live blogging can engage your community as few things can. Live blogs have an amazing power to connect, share, analyze, educate and advertise. It is the perfect opportunity to answer to five essential questions towards any occurrence: who, what, where, when, and why.
So as to use Live Blog correctly in your digital content strategy, you need to pay attention to some details in the first place.
A live blog strategy demands a huge amount of focus while the event takes place. Still, you should be prepared way before the event starts. In the first place, choosing the right events to live blog is essential. The experience needs to be valuable to your customers, otherwise, you will be wasting money and time.
Secondly, a bunch of matters should be taken into account after you’ve chosen the ideal event. How is the internet connection and infrastructure where your editor is planning to broadcast? In those minutes where little is happening at the event, what material will you show your audience? How will you keep the attention of your public and increase their engagement after the streaming?
Keep in mind that you need to have a content strategy for what you’re communicating before, during, and after the event.
Last, but not least, it is equally determining to find a platform that fits your company’s needs and is easy for your customers to use. Live Blog platforms should be secure and able to go off without a hitch, aligned with high-level customer experience.
It also should be versatile and ready to run on multiple operating systems, working just as well on both mobile and desktop devices, and offer personalized setups.
You can add live chats so your readers will engage in quick-paced conversations and spend more time on your website. You can create polls to know that their opinions are. You can cover breaking events as much as events that are unfolding during a longer period of time. The possibilities are endless.
It all depends on how your company communicates with your audience and what concerns will be addressed by the real-time content you will stream. A live blog strategy can be a powerful engaging tool during official announcements, when related news break, in Q&As, and even in product launches – Apple being the biggest example on how to use live blogs for launch talks.
Once you decide to live blog, you will notice that it is easier to depend less on social networks. However, it is also possible to take advantage of social media integration by using automate live blog solutions to compile news from a wide variety of sources.
Let’s not forget that live blog strategies can work only so far without motivated human resources behind them. Technology is essential, but customer experiences are deeply affected by people interacting with readers and users. And that is where live blog makes your strategy flourish: by putting the right editors behind the screen to create fantastic customer experiences.
Take a look at how Arena’s clients are empowering their content and engagement strategy by live blogging.
A press conference to fight for: Fox Sports
Ahead of its blockbuster in 2018, UFC live-blogged a heated press conference led by fighters Conor McGregor and Khabib Nurmagomedov. Seen as the most talented mixed martial artists in the world, both UFC icons were watched by over 500,000 people on Youtube. Meanwhile, Fox Sports live-blogged the conference, widening discussion both in their timeline and live chat. It successfully gave readers an exclusive place to comment about the fiery discussions that followed.
Jambase: music any time, anywhere
When it comes to live blog strategy, Jambase promotes live events to connect music fans everywhere with the music they love. One of those is “Dinner And a Movie”, a weekly event that live streams Phish’s concerts. The livestream gives fans a chance to watch previous Phish shows while discussing in the live chat. A plus is that Phish’s Replay, as the event is called, promotes recipes that readers can cook before watching the shows – an action that brings them together.
Greenpeace: As it happened: #BarclaysShutdown
Tired of watching Barclays pour billions into fossil fuels, Greenpeace activists enrolled in shutting down more than 100 Barclays branches across the United Kingdom in 2020.
The event was soon promoted on Greenpeace’s website. #BarclaysShutdown was live-blogged chronologically. Tweets, videos, and links that redirected people to email Barclay’s CEO were brought together as a way to deliver fresh news regarding the shutdowns and create awareness.
Liveblogging the protests also shed a light on the challenges Greenpeace faces when it comes to climate-wrecking industries and generated a sense of community between activists – even those that couldn’t physically join.
Learn from those who are engaging audiences through their live blog strategy
To sum it up, live blogging helps you reach wider audiences and attract public attention while providing authentic and exclusive content. As a result, it increases customer engagement and revenue.
Arena’s live blog solution is highly customizable and allows the addition of social features to enrich the interactions between you and your audience. Our platform works on any website, from desktop to mobile, supports live chat rooms, and is ready to manage multiple people covering the same event at once. It also contains a mobile app that makes possible a post-on-the-go strategy, so your editors won’t miss a thing while broadcasting.
We work day after day to empower editors from more than 120 countries to cover any breaking news or live event in real-time, breaking their dependence on social networks.
So, if you want to use content to truly engage your audience, it is time for you to join us and find out the best professional and user-generated content using our advanced content discovery platform.
Claim your free trial now and start live blogging right away!
