Find out how to use live blog platforms to make your content more interactive and contextualized, while also having new revenue opportunities
If we could paint a picture of current digital content landscape, it would probably look like a window with dozens of opened tabs. In such a pulverized scenario, news organizations work hard provide audiences with relevant content that can set them apart from content sameness.
The dream of every editor is to build a consistent community of recurrent readers and viewers that will hopefully spend a lot of time on their digital properties. Doing so is not always easy in the economy of attention, where audiences are constantly swinging between different channels and social media.
The truth is user’s navigation journey is very fragmented, and so interactivity and timing are key for publishers that want to keep their audience engaged. It’s no coincidence that most discussions about news happen on a real time-basis on social media, forums and messaging apps.
What many editors don’t know, though, is that news don’t have to be static and that they can incorporate all these kinds of interactions to their content. Editorial teams are increasingly adopting live blogging tools to bring social components to their work.
What if you could publish news as they happen on your webpage, without having to write a full report right away? Or maybe you could deliver curated news with multiple narrative formats? Those are just a few ways live blogs can help your newsroom.
In this guide, we will teach you how to use live blogs to deliver news in a more dynamic way.
But what is a live blog, after all?
A live blog, sometimes called “live text”, is basically a blog post that can be integrated to news websites, providing rolling coverage of an event in real-time. Liveblogging allows you to post regular updates to your blog as an event is taking place, rather than writing about it just afterward.
A live blog can put together contents that are usually fragmented across the internet, 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.
Liveblog is widely used for breaking news coverage, as it combines reported information to content pieces from outside the news organization, like user-generated content and inputs from social media. It’s a transparent format in which journalists are able to update and attach multiple formats in a digestible layout.
No matter the scope of your content production, live blogs can certainly serve your content strategy in some way. They are often used for covering live events: sports matches, elections, conferences, Q&As, red carpets, awards events, product launches – the opportunities are limitless.
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 main 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 himself. In liveblogging, everything is about context.
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Why investing in liveblogging?
News organizations use live blogs for different purposes, whether the strategy is to reach new readers, increase audience engagement or automate newsroom workflow. Ultimately, live blogs can provide better production experience to your editorial team, while offering seamless content consumption experience to the final audience.
From a monetization standpoint, they can even foster new revenue streams for your company, once it boosts engagement and content syndication. We’ll talk more about it later.
The essence of live blogging, however, is to build a “sense of dialogue” between the reporter and their audience. In 2013, a study conducted by the University of London found out that readers increasingly prefer live blogs to static content, also discovering that live blogs are able to get up to 300% more views and 233% more visitors than conventional online articles on the same subject.
Live blog is a great option if you want to reach readers who look for news on-the-go, through mobile devices or while commuting, for instance. With the rise of mobile connectivity through 5G in the next years, we might as well see an explosion in live blog consumption – another great reason to start experimenting with it.
Besides, live blog encourages readers to interact more with your content, whether by asking questions, retweeting or commenting on your own page. It gives you the chance of keeping users in your own “walled garden” instead of letting them scape to comment about your news elsewhere on the internet. This increase in interactivity can ultimately boost your organic traffic results.
From a branding perspective, live blogging allows publishers to position themselves as authorities in content curation, which is valuable for mass outlets and publishers that target niche audiences. The key to live blogging is making your followers associate your brand with relevancy and credibility – maybe the two main currencies in journalism.
Optimizing editorial work though live blog
Whether your newsroom is filled with experienced editors or young reporters, the fact is journalistic work has become more and more complex over the years. Journalists have to deal with an increasing amount of content channels and sources of information, while daily hours remain the same and newsrooms keep on shrinking.
In many media companies, content distribution and curation are still completely manual, which is time-consuming for reporters and editors. Among its many applications, live blog can help editorial teams optimize their workload.
One of the many benefits of liveblogging is optimizing live coverages. As agility is key in journalism, automation plays an important role in live blog tools. Reporters can use it to track specific accounts from social media and automatically post content to the vehicle.
While covering live events, reporters are often busy paying attention to event’s details, talking to relevant sources and posting their content in multiple platforms. In those circumstances, liveblogs are not only a great narrative resource, but also a great tool to be quicker in your tasks. Liveblogs are also useful for journalists that are supporting events coverage from the newsroom.
Liveblogs provide a quick way to search and post videos and images, too, while also offering the possibility to schedule posts and save for later publishing. As an editor, you can also set up the tool so your team can post news altogether.
Main liveblog features
Now that you have learned about the wonders of live blogging, let’s talk about the main live blog features. The whole point of live blog tools is to add interactive layers to your content. Most platforms enable publishers to personalize live blogs with little or no coding involved, from visual configurations to social media integrations.
Here are some of the main features:
- Customizing live blog layout and theme according to your branding and design style guide
- Embedding a code for an event on your website, or incorporating a liveblog plugin to your WordPress
- Enriching posts with social media content and headshots
- Adding reactions, share, and threaded comments for each post to keep your audience engaged
- Adding a live chat room to your live blog, in order to encourage ongoing discussion about news
- Enabling in-feed comments inside your website
- Creating interactive polls to have your audience entertained and gather opinion for editorial stories
- Posting user-generated content to your live blog, curated from social media and other platforms
- Enabling reactions buttons and sound notifications (not available in all liveblog tools)
Use Cases for content strategy
1) Bringing interactivity to news updates
Most news outlets usually publish their news and let conversation about them happen outside their properties. Through live blog, you can successfully keep your readers within your website and allow them to live a comment with other readers. They can also follow up on social media without leaving your news page.
In this example by news website G1, in Brazil, there is an infographic updated in real-time about the number of coronavirus cases worldwide. There is a section of related tweets right below, curated by G1’s editorial team, and also a live chat window where readers can comment in real-time.
2) Complementing live events coverage
Imagine your reporters are covering a sports match or a music festival. They could wait until the event is over to write a full article, but just doing so is not enough nowadays, once most of the conversation about the match or concert already happens on social media as the event takes place. Through live blogging, journalists can highlight the best moments of an event as it happens.
Let’s take this match, played by brazilian soccer team Santos, as an example. News website Uol created a thread of Tweets inside their page, picking a series of tweets that gave context to what was happening on the match. Fox Sports did the same while covering a press conference with UFC fighter Conor McGregor.
Things to consider when using live blog for events:
- It’s a good idea to set up an introductory post before the coverage actually starts
- Content planning should consider your target audience and the amount of time your audience should reserve for the content.
- Most of the time, shorter and easily consumable content is the best option.
- If you’re using video as a format for your live blog coverage, your team should also consider the quality of internet on site.
- It’s important to set up a specific category or tag for the event, to make it easy for people to follow and drive traffic.
3) Giving more context to news and campaigns
News organizations often use live blogging to offer regular summaries about a given topic, particularly those that have various updates over the course of a day. Let’s say the Congress is having multiple hearings on a single day. Liveblogging can be a good idea to summarize essential outcomes.
In this piece by Greenpeace, the NGO used liveblogging to give readers more context about one of its awareness campaigns. In order to amplify its “#BarcleysShutdown” campaign, Greenpeace’s team aggregated multiple contents to its website post, including a video about the campaign, tweets and older articles it had produced before the campaign itself.
4) Incorporating user-generated stories
Liveblogging is also a great idea if you want to complement information from “official sources” with backstage and opinion inputs from readers, experts and the online community.
Colombian news site Kienyke used live blogging to bring different perspectives to a student’s protest coverage. Beyond the official information gathered by the website’s staff, the article about the protest also brought videos and testimonials made by people who were at the rally.
5) Strengthening niche audiences
Liveblogging also brings a unique opportunity to boost niche audiences. We all know how difficult it can be to build and monetize specific communities, because they tend to drive smaller traffic if compared to mass audiences.
By using liveblogs, you can bring together specific communities around your content, turning your blog into a valuable content hub for them. Assuming your vehicle covers the automotive business: as your team covers car launches, they could present news updates, live comments on social media and posts from niche influencers on a single page. That way, your page automatically becomes more attractive to that niche’s loyal audience.
6) Liveblog as second screen
In the entertainment industry, live blogs can provide a shared experience for fans. As the audience watches the transmission of a popular TV show our series, entertainment outlets can offer an interactive hub where fans can exchange ideas and comments.
That’s what entertainment reporter Donna Dickens did a couple of years ago, when HBO show Game of Thrones was still airing. She offered an interactive dashboard on her article’s webpage on Uproxx where fans could post their ideas.
Another entertainment example was the 58th edition of the Grammy Awards, in 2016, where the awards organization created a pinboard to complement broadcast transmission. The result was a more engaging content experience involving text, photos and videos of performing artists, bands, nominees, backstage shenanigans, pre-show rehearsals, red carpet style and important moments from past award ceremonies.
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Liveblog as an insights source
Even though live blogging is more frequently associated with content production, it can also serve your analytics strategy, as it is an incremental source of audience insights. A live blog gives you the opportunity to look at audience engagement in a holistic way, instead of just connecting separate pieces of data from different platforms.
Through analytics dashboards, it allows you to see how well your live events are performing and how the audience navigates through the content journey you have curated. That way, you can constantly improve your content strategy according to users response, and therefore improve the quality of time spent on your content.
Plus, not only the editorial team can benefit from live blog’s insights. Some tools allow publishers to integrate their AdSense accounts and show ads inside the live blog feed. That’s interesting for marketing teams as well, in case they need to publicize any special projects and initiatives.
How can you use liveblog to drive results and better ROI?
When done thoughtfully, live blogging can improve your content results in many aspects. The first visible benefit is leveraging a website’s overall SEO (search engine optimization) results. That is because live blog content is becoming more visible to web search engines. If you have a good live blog strategy, it is likely that your news organization’s coverage (and its profile) will rank higher on Google. You can also use live blog to boost monetization through blog syndication.
At first glance, it might sound like live blogs only drive immediate traffic, because it is focused on real-time content. But it turns out they actually bring a lot of longtail traffic, considering that users often go back to blog feeds to recap content details.
Because you can post videos to your live blog, it is also useful in bringing more views outside video-only platforms, like YouTube or Vimeo.
If you’re worried about convincing your company board that the investment is worth it, you can tell your director that live blogs can also increase return on investment (ROI). Since the essence of live blog is to improve time spent on digital properties, at the end of the day, that means your company will have better numbers for the media kit – and therefore, for advertisers.
By increasing time spent and organic engagement on your proprietary pages, your company will probably be able to attract a more qualified audience and advertisers.
Live Blog vs. Broadcasting
If you come from a traditional news environment, you might still ask: how are liveblogs different from live broadcasting? It seems like it all boils down to delivering real-time content to your audience, except for the fact that liveblogs work in digital spaces, right? Not really.
The premise of broadcasting is that your audience will follow through an entire content transmission, whether they happen in linear channels, such as live TV, or livestreams on YouTube, for instance. Live broadcasting is great when you want your audience to fully dive into a single content flow, as it happens on webinars and full sports transmissions. They require longer engagement and uninterrupted attention over a longer period.
In cases like that, the audience tends to be willing to take their time watching, if they feel like the content brings value to them. However, this broadcasting dynamics usually doesn’t allow much interactivity and the audience has little control over the content experience.
Liveblogging, on the other hand, is more interesting when you’re at frequent risk of losing your target’s attention. Specially when it comes to digital journalism, publishers are often competing with other channels for user’s attention, as the reader has the option to stay on their page or check on cats GIFs on the social media next door.
Liveblogging brings more personalization to the audience’s navigation and the possibility to engage with multiple content formats all at once – something impossible in broadcasting. That is particularly appealing for users who search for a more curated content experience without having to go all over the internet to connect pieces of content.
How to choose the perfect live blog tool?
So let’s say your newsroom finally decided to buy a live blogging tool. How can you choose the one that bests suits your needs?
Flexibility: The first tip is to look for a solution that is “platform agnostic”, which means it has to be able to run on multiple devices (smartphones, desktops, tablets) and be integrated to different potential formats, like different social networks and image and video interfaces.
Usability for the team: It is also interesting to consider the tool’s usability, both on your team’s side and the customer’s side. This tool will probably be managed by professionals with different backgrounds, not only editors and reporters, but possibly designers and even marketing professionals, therefore it needs to be simple and intuitive for everyone.
Usability for the audience: From the audience’s perspective: is it easy to share updates outside the blog? Is navigation seamless throughout the page? These should be on the checklist for consideration.
Integrations and features: Other questions to ask before committing to a live blog tool is if it can match your brand identity and be integrated to your existing content management system (CMS).
Data privacy and safety: At last, but not least, it is strongly recommended that you check on live blog tool’s data privacy policies. Once the platform will be integrated to your website and collecting audience data, it is important that the tool is compliant to data privacy regulations and uses your first-party data sensibly.
With those topics in mind, it will be easier to find a platform that is safe, useful and purposeful for your newsroom and your target audience.
Next Steps
If you read all the way here and are still curious about how live blogging can add value to your content strategy, maybe it’s time to get practical.
By clicking on this link, you can get access to a free trial version of Arena’s Liveblog Tool. Our tool is currently used by companies such as Fox Sports, Microsoft and Turner.