Live Blogs are a fantastic way to show content more dynamically and address your content curation capabilities. In this post, you’ll learn the benefits of Live Blog and how to install and set up a Live Blog in WordPress easily.
Does your company rely on content to attract and engage the audience? If that is the case, you are well aware that a considerable challenge is to keep up with the immediacy of content production and distribution.
Brands and publishers are expected to provide the most up to date information and act as a filter of reality. Customers have all kinds of content formats available in just a few clicks away and have become used to interacting in different platforms in real-time.
Thus, live digital experiences have become a must for companies who want to engage audiences and position themselves as great content curators.
An effective way to catch people’s attention with interactive, real-time content is through Live Blog, an appealing content stream that can be aggregated to news websites, live events transmissions, and blogs.
Incorporating Live Blog to your content strategy might seem complicated, but it is pretty simple. Are you wondering how to begin? Maybe a good starting point can be to deliver Live Blogs in your WordPress blog.
In this post, we will explore the benefits of Live Blogging and deliver relevant information for your followers, as well as its benefits for your engagement strategy.
At the end of the post, we’ll walk you through the steps of posting a Live Blog in WordPress with Arena’s Live Blog plugin.
What is a Live Blog?
A Live Blog, sometimes called “live text,” is a platform that mixes proprietary and third-party content formats and sources to generate a stream of real-time content. It is a blog post that can be integrated into news websites, providing rolling coverage of an event or a subject in real-time.
Live blogs allow content professionals to attach regular updates to a blog post as an event takes place, rather than updating a static post after it ends. A live-blogged article gets updated consistently to make sure the reader is aware of the latest developments.
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Another important thing is that Live Blogs bring together content formats that are usually fragmented across the internet – social media posts, videos, comments, and whatever forms you find useful to your narrative.
Another way to think of a Live Blog is as a curated multimedia narrative, a summary of the highlights about a given topic or news piece. Its primary purpose is to create a high-quality, guided content experience that would be difficult for the customer to replicate by wandering through social media and news feeds by themselves.
Liveblogging is an excellent way of complementing articles and written stories with images, videos, tweets, quotes from experts, polls, chat windows, and other digital materials that can be embedded in the post.
Who uses Live Blogs?
News organizations widely use live Blogs for breaking news and live events coverage as it combines information reported by journalists to content pieces from other sources, like user-generated content and inputs from social media. It’s a transparent format in which journalists can update and attach multiple sizes in a digestible layout.
However, Live Blogs have been useful for other sectors, basically for any company that works with content in some way. They can be used for conferences, sports events, or content production related to any niche. They help brands build a relationship of trust with the customer and better understand their audiences.
In a nutshell, live blogs can undoubtedly serve your content strategy in some way, no matter the scope of your content production.
How can Live Blog enhance your content strategy?
Different organizations use Live Blog with different goals in mind, whether the strategy is to reach new readers, increase audience engagement, or automate content production workflow. Live blogs optimize a lot of the editorial work while offering seamless content consumption experience to the final audience.
Let’s dive into a few outcomes of Live Blogs for content strategies:
Increasing audience engagement
The essence of live blogging is to build a “sense of dialogue” between your brand and your target audience. In 2013, a study conducted by the University of London found that readers increasingly prefer live blogs to static content, discovering that live blogs can get up to 300% more views and 233% more visitors than conventional online articles on the same subject.
Increasing time-spent on your channels
Live Blog encourages readers to interact more with your content. It gives you the chance to keep users on your web page instead of letting them escape to comment about your news elsewhere on the internet. This increase in interactivity can ultimately boost your organic traffic results.
Diversifying your content
When Content Walls and Content Hubs have become trendy, Live Blogs help brands stay competitive by diversifying the myriad of content they display in their official channels. Liveblogging is a great way to enrich static content and incorporate short-form content pieces – increasingly valued by audiences – into traditional formats.
Bringing new revenue opportunities
Live Blogs can foster new revenue streams for your company once they boost engagement and content syndication from a monetization standpoint.
Becoming an authority in your market
From a branding perspective, Live Blogs allow companies to position themselves as authorities in content curation, which is valuable for brands that deal with massive audiences as well as the ones that target niche audiences.
The key to liveblogging is making your followers associate your brand with relevance and credibility – two of the main currencies in the economy of attention.
Learning about your audience
Because live blog tools can be integrated into your analytics, you can adopt it as an incremental social listening instrument. Live Blog represents a new way to observe your customers’ navigation behavior and how they respond to your content. Ultimately, you can get valuable insights that will lead to a better understanding of your target audience and needs.
Discover the main Live Blog features
If you are interested in using Live Blog in your content strategy, you probably already did some research about the available tools.
At Arena, we are proud to say we have developed a tremendous Live Blog tool used by major publishers and media companies. We also built a WordPress plugin that is very simple to install and setup.
The WordPress plugin makes it incredibly well-suited for all types of companies who want to stand out with their content.
With Arena’s plugin, you can create Live Blog sessions for live events or specific thematic coverages. You could use it for covering sports, breaking news, and complementing live conferences – just to state a few examples.
With our plugin, your Live Blog can be fully automated or moderated by an editor or community manager. Besides, you can mix content generated by your content team with user-generated content from social media.
Arena’s Live Blog platform and plugin provide critical features such as:
- Real-time Live Blogging
- Social Media monitoring
- Integration to Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, and other platforms
- Posting user-generated content curated from social media
- Automatic or moderated sports play-by-play
- Layout customization according to your brand and design style guide
- Sports calendar integration
- Real-time audience analytics
- Cross-posting to social media
- Enabling in-feed comments inside the Blog
- Optimization for mobile
- Unlimited number of editors to manage your live events
- Live Chat integration to encourage ongoing discussion about your event
7 steps to Live Blogging with WordPress
Live Blogging can bring much dynamism for your content strategy, and thus it might sound complex to execute, but it’s as simple as making and uploading a regular blog post.
It takes just a few steps to get started with a Live Blog on WordPress and offer your audience updated content in real-time. With Arena’s Live Blog, you can quickly start a live blog and have the opportunity to feature different media types on your website.
But enough bragging about Arena’s plugin. Now we’ll walk you through the steps of installing it and setting it up, which is pretty simple.
Step 1: installing Arena’s WordPress Plugin
To get started, simply access the “Plugin” section within WordPress and click “Add New.” Then, all you have to do is search for Arena.im in the list of featured plugins and click “Install Now.”
Step 2: Setting up your account
The next step is to match your company’s account with the Arena plugin. To do that, go to the “Settings” section and click “Arena.” That’s where you will find the accounts, organizations, and site preferences. All you have to do is select the account you will use to live Blog, choose your site, and click “Save.”
The plugin will then grant you access to Arena’s tool so it can automate Live Blog posts. Depending on your WordPress configurations, you may need to activate the Live Blog function in your WordPress posts.
Step 3: creating a brand new Live Blog within a blog post
If your idea is to create a blog post from scratch with live blogging functions, all you have to do is access Arena’s dashboard and click “Create New Event.” The process is pretty similar to creating a regular post.
You will also choose your preferences for the event and create a title and a brief description of the post. Your texts must be creative, as they will help your Live Blog rank better on Google.
You will also select an event category like News, Film and TV, Shows, or Finance. If your goal is to make content updates in real-time, make sure you enable updates in real-time.
Step 4: creating a social stream in your Live Blog
At this same dashboard, you can click “Add Stream” to search accounts and keywords from social media and add content to your Live Blog curation. For instance, you could choose to display tweets or videos from a news channel or influencer account. All you have to do is insert the link of the channel or account.
You can also set up the event status (live, upcoming, or done), add elements like tags, and enable comments or a chat room in the Live Blog post.
Step 5: layout customization
Arena’s plugin dashboard also brings some customization options. You can personalize aspects like color and the Live Blog section’s position in your post, choose language configurations, and enable elements like sound alerts and polls within the blog.
Step 6: publishing your Live Blog
If you are ready to go live, now it’s time to publish your Live Blog in your post. To integrate your WordPress editor to the settings you did with the Arena plugin, click “Add Interactive content by Arena” in the editor interface.
You can click to add a new Live Blog or select an existing one. All you have to do next is click “add” to the Live Blogs you want to publish and simply click “Publish” on the WordPress page.
Step 7: getting the link to your Live Blog (and updating it)
To get the link to your Live Blog, go to the Arena dashboard, copy the HTML code to the Live Blog and paste it on the HTML box in the WordPress editor.
This link will be seen only by you and other members of your team with access to your company’s WordPress credentials. The link will open in a new window in the editor page where you can write and publish updates.
You’re practically done! You can click “preview” to visualize how it’s going to look and “update” to apply changes.
Any more doubts about creating a Live Blog in WordPress?
In the video below, you can get a better sense of the entire process of creating a Live Blog.
Try Live Blog now!
Liveblogging can add value to your content strategy, so maybe it’s time to get practical. With our WordPress tutorial, your team is ready to get their hands on to make your content more engaging.
Want to give Arena’s Live Blog tool a try? You can access our trial version in this link or install our plugin directly on WordPress. Publishers currently use our tool across 120 countries, including Fox Sports, Microsoft, and Turner.