5 Ways News Media Can Grow Using Social Media Strategies

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For years, news organizations have struggled in the cold war with social media. Initally, classified revenue plummeted thanks to the rise of Craigslist, then, Google, Facebook, and Amazon stepped in, pulling billions of dollars in advertising revenue that used to be owned by traditional publishing. Today, a handful of mega-companies have successfully built global audiences around content: social media platforms.

To survive and thrive in the 2020s, news organizations need to study and model the specific tactics and strategies of the social media giants. Given that many social media platforms have been knocked down from their high-ground recently, the timing has never been better to take action.

Lesson 1: Offer A Highly Personalized Content Experience To Grow Engagement

Customized news feeds and streams lie at the heart of successful social media. Facebook gives you news updates on friends and family. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms offer a curated experience focused on individual users’ interests. Developing this highly curated experience requires the contribution of many engineers, algorithms, and countless experiments.

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Applying this lesson to the news organization starts by offering filters. Some of your audience might only want business news, while others simply want coverage of their favorite sports team. Rather than forcing all users to flip through all of your news content, let them choose their interests. In addition, offering subject-specific email newsletters focused on different news interests (e.g., sports, business, local news) will help to deepen audience engagement.

Building detailed profiles of your audience’s likes and dislikes is vital for boosting engagement. Another benefit to offering a customized experience is that you will have better first-party data on your audience. Consequently, you will be able to market your subscriptions more effectively. Also, you will have the opportunity to offer more targeted advertising options to your advertisers.

Lesson 2: Adapt To Changing Media Consumption Habits

Consuming social media content and updates is addictive for a reason. These platforms offer the potential for social validation and a constant stream of novelty. That’s not all – many users are turning to social media to access news content. 

Consumption of news is a primary driver of social media.

According to Deloitte’s 2022 digital media trends research, the top five reasons US consumers use social media include reading or watching the news (27%), listening to music (28%, watching TV shows and movies (23%), shopping (17%), play video games (22%) and watch sports (13%). These findings tell us that there is considerable appetite for news. Deloitte points out that the popularity of news consumption on social media is driven by algorithmic customization and cost (i.e., no paid subscription needed). 

User-Generated Content Is Gaining In Popularity

Above and beyond news consumption, many social media users are interested in user-generated content. It’s important to note that user-generated content is a broad term that covers professional-grade content creators with high production values, hobbyists, and much more. Deloitte’s research found that 70% of Gen Z now regularly consume user-generated content – a figure that has rapidly increased over the past year.

Short-Form Video Content Is Booming

Short video content, typically less than a minute long, is thriving. The most popular content creators on TikTok, like Khabane Lame, Charli d’amelio, and Addison, have uploaded over 1,000 videos to build their audience. Many successful short videos feature videos, dancing, and humor. 

Adapting To New Media Consumption Habits

Adapting to these habits as a news organization is challenging. Traditionally, news organizations focus on high production values and professionalism, which isn’t always found in user-generated content. Despite that challenge, there are opportunities to respond to this challenge. Take video content as an example. Your organization likely has significant strengths in video production and editing. Use those capabilities to create content like TikTok videos and YouTube shorts like the Washington Post.

Lesson 3: Emphasize Individuals In Addition To Your Corporate Brand

Many, if not most, social media success stories involve individuals. Take MrBeast (i.e., Jimmy Donaldson) on YouTube. With more than 100 million subscribers, he has built one of the most successful channels on the platform. Many other top channels on the platform are built around individuals like Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Swedish YouTube star PewDiePie. 

Applying this lesson in a new organization is relatively easy. For the past decade, many successful journalists like Maggie Haverman (New York Times), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC), and Anderson Cooper (CNN) have built a large following on Twitter. The opportunity to interact directly with your journalists is crucial. Fundamentally, engaging with a specific person is easier than with a brand.

Building an audience around a personal brand is easier for several reasons. Forming a parasocial relationship where an audience member feels connected to the content creator is easier. Social media personalities sometimes deepen these relationships by adding exclusive experiences to paying customers using platforms like Patreon.

There are a few ways to apply this social media lesson to your news organization. Look at all of your public-facing journalists and personalities and their online profiles. Find out who successfully engages with their followers by looking at replies, likes, and comments. Invite your most successful journalists to present their best practices to others in the organization.

Lesson 4: Encourage Niche Communities

Social media platforms are excellent at bringing together small groups of people with shared interests. For example, there are online groups for people interested in obvious things like real estate investing, auto repair & fashion and each of these larger audience can be further cut into niche segments.

Let’s take sports as an example. Spending five or ten minutes searching through Facebook you can easily find groups like:

  • Obsessed with NCAA Wrestling Updates (9,000+ members)
  • NBA Fantasy Basketball Discussion (11,000+ members)
  • Mets Fans For Life (18,000 members)
  • Yankees Fans (100,000+ fans)

These examples show an audience like “sports fans” has multiple significant segments. News organizations with deep connections in local sports teams have an opportunity to shine by creating dedicated niche communities. Getting started is easier than you might imagine because news organizations already have high-quality content to build their communities on. 

Lesson 5: Embrace Technical Innovation

Move fast and break things is a well-known saying in the technology industry. Social media platforms often launch new features as they observe their users and advertisers. For example, Instagram has recently focused on video content to compete more effectively against TikTok. 

News organizations may not have the same kind of product development, engineering, and technical bench strength as social media companies. Fortunately, this is less of a disadvantage than you might think. The rise of no-code and low-code platforms and integrations means adding new technologies to your website is easier than ever.

Want to improve your coverage and engagement of rapidly developing news stories like international conflicts and elections? You can install Arena Live Blog on your website in a few minutes. Want to build online events like the Wall St Journal’s Live Q&A Events? Add Arena Live Chat to your website to supplement the video streaming experience so your audience can share their feedback and questions.

Don’t Ignore Your Greatest Strength As You Innovate

There’s no doubt that news publishers can draw lessons from social media platforms. Yet, there’s a danger in drawing too much inspiration from these platforms. You don’t want to lose the soul of your organization as you chase growth. 

The most trusted news organizations have built audiences for decades. Social media companies don’t invest in investigative journalism. News organizations hold elected officials accountable for their actions and words. The best news organizations focus on fact-checking and admitting mistakes. In contrast, social media platforms have a much less impressive track record of quality and accountability.

Investigation, fact-checking, and taking on powerful interests carry a cost. Yet, those commitments are ultimately critical for maintaining your reputation and keeping engaged subscribers. If your audience loses trust in your organization, selling subscriptions and advertising space will become more difficult.

The good news is that you can innovate without selling your soul as a news organization. The first step is to add the right technology to your website. These technologies don’t require weeks or months of customization and implementation either. You can be up and running in a matter of hours when you choose Arena.

Transform The News Into An Interactive Community Experience

Publishing high-quality news, analysis, and information are no longer enough to sustain news organizations. Your website needs to offer an online community to win attention and engagement from social media platforms. Your audience wants to ask questions, meet people who share their interests, and more. Right now, social media offers these community experiences. Yet social media lacks the commitment to investigation, reporting, and truth that leading news organizations have.

Give your audience a chance to interact with each other, and engagement will go up. Page views and time on site will also increase. Book a demo with Arena today to discover how to engage your audience more.

Why publishers have nothing to fear in a recession

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Advertising spending on social media platforms is starting to fall. Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) reported that average revenue per user fell to $9.41 in Q3 2022 vs. $11.57 in Q4 2021 (source). And, more recently, it’s been reported that ½ of Twitter’s top advertisers have left in the last month (source). This represents a significant opportunity for publishers to regain advertising market share.

This shift of ad dollars away from social media creates a once-in-a-decade opportunity for publishers. Even as worries of an economic downturn cloud the horizon, there are several significant opportunities for publishers who innovate using these strategies.

Four Ways Bold Publishers Can Win In The Downturn

Rising interest rates, increasing unemployment (although still at historical lows…), and other signs of economic distress are starting to bite. A downturn is a perfect time to experiment with new approaches and methods to grow engagement and increase your value to advertisers. 

1. Offer Exclusive Access To VIPs In Online Events

Reddit, a mid-sized social platform, is known for its successful “AMA” (ask me anything) events. Past participants in these events include Jeopardy! champion, Ken Jennings, businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates, and countless other CEOs and authors. These events are popular because they give the audience a unique chance to interact directly with a celebrity.

As a publisher, you have relationships with politicians, athletes & community leaders. A city news publication might organize a panel or AMA event with the mayor, local investors, or local sports team. There are a few ways to pursue this idea: large-scale public events and exclusive smaller events.

Public Event With VIPs

This event format is a great way to maximize your audience and advertising revenue. For example, a lifestyle magazine might organize an event on local craft breweries. Offer attendees the chance to ask questions, enter draws for free drinks and meet fellow fans. This focused event makes it easier to sign up for paying event sponsors because your audience is more likely to be focused and engaged.

Running a successful event public event will take more planning. There’s an increased risk of inappropriate content when anybody can attend the event. That’s why it is essential to use a live chat platform with both manual and AI automated moderation features like Arena Live Chat. If running a large-scale event isn’t a good fit for your publication, consider offering a smaller event just for your paying subscribers.

Subscriber-Only Digital Events And Benefits

The disadvantage to a public event is the scale – you may have hundreds or thousands of attendees! Creating connections with your guests and audience can be difficult at that scale. That’s where exclusive events for your subscribers play a role. Here are a few examples of subscriber-only digital event experiences that publishers offer today.

The Economist Subscriber-only digital events

The British publication offers live events to its subscribers on topics such as The World Ahead 2023, The Year In Review, America’s Election Results, and China and Ukraine at war. The Economist’s digital events are relatively short – just one hour. Organizing a one-hour virtual event with a few of your top journalists is accessible to most publishers. It’s also a great way to surprise your subscribers with additional value.

The New Yorker Festival

The New Yorker Festival is a multi-day event featuring world premieres of documentaries, political events, and events with celebrities. The publication offers subscribers a 30% discount on ticket prices for the event. In addition, subscribers get early access to buy tickets. The New Yorker event has in-person and virtual aspects. The New Yorker approach takes more time and effort to organize. It’s also a powerful way to distinguish your publication from others.

With these smaller events, it’s smart to promote the limited nature of the event. For instance, if you only have 50 seats, emphasize that fact. In a smaller event, each attendee will have a better chance of having their questions answered.

2. Curate The Gold In Social Media Content

Editorial judgment is one of the most important ways publications add value to their audiences. Your journalists know their beats inside out. You can use that expertise to curate the best in social media for your audience. There are a few ways to curate social media content for your audience.

Enrich Your Coverage With Social Updates

Many publishers offer a live blog or series of breaking news updates when a major event occurs, like an election, sporting event, or conference. Publishing a steady stream of news updates as an event can tax the energy of your journalists. With Arena Live Blog, you can pull in social media updates through hashtags & specific accounts and apply filters to ensure brand-safe posts.

Fact Check Social Media Posts

Misinformation on social media is a major problem. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee published an analysis of COVID-19 misinformation trends in 2021 that illustrates one aspect of the problem. The study found that “fake cure” Tweets were common in the western US, while “Covid as a hoax” misinformation was more common in the mid-West. 

Communicating complex scientific information, which often involves probabilities and uncertainty, is challenging. For publishers with professional reporters, evaluating this information critically is a strength. Fact-checking rumors, misinformation, and other social media content is important for publications to add value to their audience.

Invite Social Media Influencers

Many publishers have struggled to maintain a large staff of professional journalists, while others have closed up shop entirely (we miss you, Protocol!). Inviting freelancers and qualified influencers from social media to share their thoughts with your audience can help. For example, a growing community of true crime enthusiasts on social media are hungry to find the guilty and free the innocent. Inviting true crime influencers like Kendall Rae (over 3 million YouTube subscribers) and Shaun Atwood (over 700,000 YouTube subscribers) is one way you can enrich your coverage further.

Create the Best of Social Media Lists

Keeping up with all of the latest developments on social media is difficult! Help your audience save time by recognizing the best social media accounts in niche areas. Praising influencers is one of the best ways to get their attention and start building a relationship. After you feature them in one of these lists, you may find it easier to invite them to contribute to your website or join events.

Connecting your publication to other digital experiences may start with social media but it shouldn’t end there. Enriching the streaming experience represents another way to win in a difficult time.

3. Enrich The Streaming Experience

The average American household subscribes to 4.7 streaming services according to Bloomberg. However, Bloomberg also estimates that streaming service growth may have plateaued for the foreseeable future.

The relatively low cost of streaming services means they are likely to be somewhat recession-resistant. Unlike other leisure activities like travel and restaurants, streaming service costs remain relatively affordable for many households. 

If there is a significant economic downturn in 2023 or 2024, affordable leisure activities like streaming services will likely gain more attention. That creates an opportunity for publishers to engage streaming fans more deeply. If your organization has significant entertainment news staff or access to stars, that is a significant opportunity!

There are a few ways to build or grow audiences around streaming service programming. 

Organize Viewing Parties

Invite your audience to open their Netflix, Disney+, or other streaming service and watch the latest release alongside your staff. This type of virtual event works best when it is tightly focused. For example, a viewing party focused on fantasy adaptations like “House of the Dragon” or historical dramas like “Bridgerton” are more likely to attract audience attention. Use Arena Live Chat to power this event and make it easy for your audience to share their reactions as the event unfolds.

Invite Fans Behind The Scenes With the Cast and Crew

The chance to see your favorite actors, writers and directors talk about their work is incredibly appealing to many fans. Inviting a few cast members to a virtual event is relatively easy and low-cost. If you give fans the opportunity to ask questions, they’re likely to stay to the end. 

Working with streaming services may not be suitable for all brands. What if you are focused on a different niche, like fashion and beauty? There’s another low-cost way for publishers to build their audience and keep people coming back for more: user-generated content!

4. Leverage The Authenticity of User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) built the social media platforms. It’s time for publishers to embrace user-generated content in new ways beyond comments on news articles. 

Thoughtfully highlighting UGC on your website is smart because it can bring additional trust and engagement. Social Media Today reports that consumer-created content is perceived to be the most trustworthy. UGC is also considered the most significant in influencing purchase decisions. For media brands like the Wirecutter that generate affiliate sales, featuring UGC on your website makes sense.

While exciting, increasing the amount of UGC on a publisher’s website needs to be done carefully. Publishers need to exercise editorial oversight over this content including enforcing their codes of conduct. To reduce the burden of oversight, starting with less polarizing content themes like lifestyle topics and sports may be helpful. Influencers with a few thousand followers may be willing to contribute to your publication in return for exposure. 

Do You Have The Right Technology To Grow Your Digital Audience?

A growing, highly engaged audience is indispensable to growing advertising revenue and thriving in tough times. Allow your audience to interact and join events with Arena. Arena Live Blog is the perfect tool to enhance your coverage of breaking news. Arena Live Chat is what you need to create more engaging digital events. The economic downturn is your opportunity to grow – seize it!

How to know the ROI for a Customer Data Platform

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Adding a customer data platform to your sales and marketing workflow takes some work. So, it’s worth asking the question: is it worth the effort to use a CDP? To find the answer, let’s look at ways to measure the ROI of a customer data platform. 

Calculating Customer Data Platform ROI Step By Step

In principle, deeply understanding customer behavior should drive higher revenue. Achieving that result takes time and the right approach. Let’s start by gathering the correct numbers.

1) Know Your Sales And Marketing Numbers Before Using A CDP

To fully understand the impact of a customer data platform on your business, it is crucial to gather some numbers. Precisely, measure these numbers before using a CDP and then look at them afterward.

  • The number of leads. This measure should be the easiest to track – count the number of leads you typically gain per month. If possible, look at six to twelve months of data and take the average.
  • Lead quality. There are different ways to determine lead quality. For example, you might measure the proportion of marketing-qualified leads that convert to sales-qualified leads.
  • Ad campaign effectiveness (e.g., cost per lead). Running a lead generation advertising campaign is much easier when you deeply understand your audience. If you’re just getting started, you are likely to have a high cost per lead. With better data, you can bring this figure down over time.
  • Sales cycle time. Measure the time between a lead’s first encounter with your business and purchase. While external factors, like the overall economic environment, also impact this figure, it is still intelligent to track. 

With these data points in mind, let’s proceed to the next phase of the ROI measurement process.

2) Install and configure your customer data platform.

In this step, install and configure your customer data platform. For this platform to deliver maximum value, take the time to review your customer data for quality. The ROI from the CDP will be low if you start with poor data.

To assess your customer data quality, consider the following points:

Do you have accurate information about customers and how they became customers?

Take a list of your 100 most recent customers and look at the customer journey. Ideally, your CDP should help you to understand their experience. For example, did the majority of prospects interact with sales only after attending a virtual event? If you don’t have this customer data yet, start planning to gather it. Customer surveys and automated tracking can help to address these points.

Without the ability to accurately trace the customer journey, measuring marketing effectiveness and making data-driven decisions about what to focus on next is difficult.

Are you gathering zero-party and first-party data from customers and prospects?

Third-party platforms like lead providers and social media have a role to play. However, these sources are limited. They don’t tell you what a given person thinks or feels about your specific brand. A fully implemented customer data platform can equip you with these insights. 

Zero-party data is data that customers decide to share with an organization like product preferences in a survey. For example, you might run a survey to customers about what websites and brands they like the most. Responses to this survey would be zero-party data. First-party data, on the other hand, is a bit different. It is data that a customer agrees to provide by using your website, interacting with your emails, and so forth. Regularly gathering these data points is an important way 

Are you using a scoring system?

Scoring becomes more important as you scale up your lead generation and marketing efforts. Large companies develop higher sophisticated models to score leads, but that’s not the only way. You can take a simpler approach if you’re just getting started. For example, you might distinguish between new prospects (i.e., they have been on your email list for less than five days), highly engaged leads (i.e., they have been on your email list for 30 days and have participated in an online event) and customers (i.e., they have purchased in the past 12 months). Classifying prospects into these three categories will help you make better decisions about using your marketing resources.

With this foundation, you’re ready to install your customer data platform.

3) Generate first-party data for your customer data platform

On its own, a customer data platform does not produce a return on investment. To achieve results, there are two more crucial ingredients. First, it’s vital to feed more data into the platform regularly. Second, taking sales and marketing actions is vital based on what you find in the CDP. Let’s start with the first ingredient.

Generating a steady stream of first-party data is one of the best ways to make your CDP more valuable. For most brands, it makes sense to focus on getting more people to your website and ensuring they have an engaging experience. A website visitor that arrives and leaves a few seconds later will not give you much to work with.

There are a few ways to make your website more appealing to customers. You start with a foundation of design, fast technology, and a simple user interface. Next, publish content that directly speaks to your customers’ needs and problems. Finally, enrich your website by transforming it into a virtual events platform using a live blog or a live chat experience. Taken together, technology, content, and community experiences will make your website more appealing. As website visitors keep returning over time, you will have more opportunities to gather data about their preferences.

Once your website generates a significant amount of first-party data, how do you transform that data into valuable insights? That’s what we’ll cover in the next section.

4) Develop new sales and marketing ideas based on CDP data

Your next step is to develop new ideas based on the data you’re seeing in your customer data platform. Success requires both art and science. The art is coming up with sales and marketing ideas regularly. The science is grounding those ideas in the data available on your platform. Let’s illustrate this principle with two examples.

Online publisher

A digital publisher is concerned about subscribers not renewing their subscriptions after the first year. To solve this problem, the publisher reviews their CDP and looks for patterns between people who renew their subscriptions and those who do not. The publisher may notice that 90% of renewing subscribers access paid content once per week and have attended at least two subscriber-only online events.

Based on these patterns, the publisher decides to test the following marketing campaign ideas:

  • Highlight the “best article of the week” to subscribers. The objective is to make it easier for subscribers to use – read just one article.
  • Improve virtual events with special guests. To make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing, the publisher invites celebrity guests to a “Ask Me Anything” session to make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing.

After developing these marketing campaign ideas, the publisher can measure the ROI of the campaign using their customer data platform. 

Ecommerce company

A clothing e-commerce company is finding it difficult to achieve a reasonable return on its online advertising campaigns. By using the CDP, the marketing manager quickly discovers the problem. Many customers buy only when the company offers discount codes and never buy again. Fortunately, the company has noticed that customers who come through referral campaigns (e.g., Instagram influencers creating sponsored posts) seem to lead to ongoing campaigns.

The e-commerce company developed a few new marketing campaign ideas based on these insights.

  • Increase budget allocation to influencer marketing campaigns.
  • Change the creative focus for paid advertising campaigns. Instead of advertising a discount offer, new campaigns take advantage of holiday promotions (e.g., back-to-school season).
  • Increase content marketing campaigns with partners to drive more referral traffic.

5) Gather the right data for a marketing ROI comparison.

If you’ve followed the process, you’ve installed a customer data platform, gathered new data, and implemented some new marketing ideas. Now, you can compare your marketing effectiveness before and after using the CDP.

To avoid confusing data, aim to make the pre-CDP and post-CDP implementation comparison as similar as possible. For example, focus on the same period (i.e., January to July of this year when you had the CDP vs. January to July of the previous year before you had the CDP).

Aim to exclude other factors that might significantly skew the results to the degree possible. For example, if there have been significant changes in the monthly marketing budget (e.g., $10,000 per month last year vs. $15,000 per month this year), be mindful of those changes. 

6) Measure the ROI of your customer data platform

In this step, you’ll directly compare the results achieved before using the CDP and after using the CDP. If you’ve been feeding high-quality data to the CDP and making business decisions based on CDP insights, you’re likely to see a substantial improvement in CDP return on investment. In this case, take a moment to celebrate with your marketing team! You’ve successfully leveraged data insights to grow your business!

What if the return on investment results aren’t that exciting? That’s entirely possible! In this situation, remember that marketing is a work in progress. Learn what you can from the campaigns that didn’t work out and try something new. 

Three Ways To Improve Customer Data Platform ROI

The following strategies will help you to get better results from your CDP. While each strategy is distinct, you’re likely to get better results using multiple strategies.

1) Look For Missing Customer Data

Missing key data points is a crucial reason customer data platforms provide limited results. For example, your focus might be on gathering data from website users. However, if the majority of customer conversations come from sales calls or social media, you might be missing key developments. Ensure your customer data platform gathers information from your website, social media, and key offline channels.

2) Validate Data With The Sales Team

For B2B companies, completing the transaction requires the sales team. Few customers are willing to make a $10,000 or $100,000 purchase without the chance to speak with a salesperson and get answers to their questions. 

There are a few ways to validate your CDP insights with the sales team. Start by looking at reports and reports from your customer relationship management (CRM). For example, look at the most recent 10-20 completed sales. Does the customer journey involve multiple touchpoints with sales representatives? If so, you might be missing those interactions in your CDP.

In addition to reviewing reports, make the time to speak with your sales colleagues. They’re emailing and calling customers every week. They can give you insights into the relevance of marketing materials (e.g., “customers loved the state of the industry report we released this year in January – can we produce more reports like that?”).

3) Take More Chances

The final way to get better results from your customer data platform is to take more chances. Specifically, we often see people gather plenty of data from customers and prospects and look at the patterns. However, some marketers are reluctant to set aside their preferences and take a risk based on what the CDP is telling them. For example, your CDP might show that video customer stories lead to better conversions. Yet, recording customer videos are often quite labor-intensive and require permission from multiple parties. Despite these challenges, it may be time to invest more in creating these assets. 

How To Get More Value From Your Customer Data Platform

You’ve seen that gathering data from a customer data platform is a powerful way to get more conversions and increase engagement. Ensure you have the right technology to gather and import first-party data into your systems to make the most of your platform. Arena Personas is a powerful tool to help you use first-party data to better segment your audiences and improve marketing efficiency.

How To Use User Generated Content In Virtual Events

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User generated content, especially from customers, is an excellent way to enhance the quality of your live virtual events. Using this type of content in your events immediately demonstrates to event participants that you care about their thoughts and feelings. However, there are some challenges associated with using user generated content effectively. Use this guide to understand UGC and ways to use it effectively in your events.

What Is User Generated Content?

User generated content is any post, image, video, or other content created by Internet users. You can find user generated content on your website, on third-party websites and social media platforms. Generally speaking, marketers focus on user generated content in public settings. If a user has restricted access to their posts or shared comments in a non-public setting, avoiding using that type of content in your marketing or live events is best.

Should You Use User Generated Content?

There are a few ways to approach this question. First, consider the legal aspect. There are potential copyright issues if you use a piece of content created by someone else without permission. Suppose an artist creates a video and you want to use that video in your live event. If you’re planning on simply showing that video to your audience, it is best to ask for permission first. If you have any questions about the legal aspects of using content created by other people, seek legal advice.

Beyond the legal dimension, there are a few other aspects to this question of using user generated content in your events. There are rarely problems with referencing user generated content for market research, event preparation or other “behind the scenes” purposes. In the event you want to use UGC directly in your marketing or website, there are a few principles to keep in mind.

Three Principles For Using User Generated Content In Your Live Event

To guide your event development, we recommend using the following three principles. For simplicity, let’s focus our discussion on publicly available social media posts like tweets on Twitter.

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Quality Curation

Curation is the art and science of selecting material that meets your goals. Museum curators don’t have the resource to display every piece of artwork that looks interesting. They must select the best paintings, sculptures, and other pieces that fit their goals and the interests of their audience. The same principle applies to marketers when selecting UGC content for their events. At a minimum, apply ‘negative curation’ to protect brand safety (i.e. avoid not safe for work type content). Ideally, look for ways to feature a wide variety of user voices and types of content (e.g. serious commentary, joke style content and others) to keep your audience engaged.

Add Commentary

Simply reposting user generated content in your live event isn’t very interesting. Your audience might think “Hey, I can see these posts for myself on Twitter – why am I here?” Instead, look for ways to add value to the user generated content you feature in your event. Tell your audience why you selected the content and why you like it.

The Spice Principle 

Spices in cooking are a great way to make a meal more appealing and flavorful. At the same time, you would not eat an entire meal made up of cumin or turmeric! Instead, skilled chefs use small amounts of spices. Likewise, user generated content should be best seen as a spice. Highlighting a few posts from users that you liked is a good way to engage your audience. An entire virtual event made up of user generated content is likely to be perceived as lazy by your audience.

With these principles in mind, let’s look at a few practical ways to use this type of content effectively in your next virtual event.

7 Ways To Use User-Generated Content To Create Engaging Events.

Feeling stuck with user generated content? Use these suggestions to get started.

Pre-Event Strategies Leveraging User-generated content 

Regularly coming up with new ideas and material for virtual events, hybrid events, live streams, and other experiences is tough! One way to ease the pressure is to view user-generated content as a source of inspiration. 

1) Audience Questions

There’s a reason why “ask me anything” (AMA) style experiences are so popular on Reddit and other platforms. People love the opportunity to ask questions and better understand people, especially celebrities. You can harness the same principle in your marketing by mining user generated content for questions. 

Start by searching social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, and elsewhere for questions about your brand and products. If you don’t turn up any usable questions, broaden your search to questions people are asking about your industry.

2) Competitor Content

You may not want to feature competitors in your virtual events and experiences. However, user generated content related to your competitors is very useful. For example, search for comments, reviews, complaints, and questions users are posing to your competitors.

Let’s say you run a software company, and your competitor is getting negative reviews about the complexity of their pricing. If your product has a simple pricing model, you might decide to use this fact (e.g., “we saw dozens of Capterra reviews complaining about hard-to-understand pricing in our industry, so we’d like to highlight our simple pricing.”)

3) Finding Trends

When you’re deeply focused on your product, you may lose track of broader trends. Remember the ice bucket challenge back in 2014? That trend took social media by storm, and it was a great opportunity to support a good cause and earn positive publicity for your brand simultaneously. 

Spending some time observing your customers on social media may clue you into new trends you can feature in your marketing. In this case, user generated content might be a source of inspiration or you might decide to use it directly.

User Generated Content In Your Event 

The value of UGC isn’t limited to inspiration or market research. You can also use it directly in your events. Take these tips as a starting point.

4) Feature Posts Using An Event Hashtag

A distinct hashtag is one of the easiest ways to encourage and identify user generated content related to your content. When users post content using the official hashtag, they might expect the company to read or reply to them. Featuring this type of content on a Live Blog is one way to incorporate hashtag content.

Keep in mind the principles we shared earlier still apply here. Creating a Live Blog on your website is more interesting if you interact with it. For example, you might ask your event host to refer to the best posts in the Live Blog a few times during a live event.

5) Highlight Influencer Posts

This technique is a more targeted way to incorporate social media content into your live experience. To use this approach effectively, we recommend identifying 5-10 influencers in advance who have at least 1,000 followers. Reach out to these influencers before your event starts and discuss a sponsorship arrangement. 

If you are paying influencers, you can work out a posting schedule to increase attendee engagement. For instance, you might ask for a total of 10 posts and have most of the posts go live in the 24-48 hours before your event starts. That will give you a chance to review the posts and choose the best posts to add to your presentations and blog posts. 

6) Lighten The Mood With Humorous Posts

Fun matters! Whenever you’re planning a virtual event, look for a few opportunities to add a dash of humor or jokes. This approach is particularly helpful when you have a multi-hour virtual event like a one-day or two-virtual event. Unlike the other approaches here, you can take a broader approach when seeking out user generated content for humor. You don’t need to limit yourself to discussions about your company or products. Instead, simply look around for user generated content like memes.

While humor is helpful in sparking engagement, keep your audience in mind. You don’t want user generated humor or jokes to trigger complaints! To minimize the chance of a problem, we suggest having two people review the humorous content before including it in your event.

7) Discuss UGC In Your Live Blog

When you run a live blog, regularly posting content is critical to maintaining engagement. As a rule of thumb, it is wise to post updates every hour at a minimum. Producing that much content in a short period of time can be quite taxing for your staff. That’s where user generated content can play a role. Here are a few ways to include UGC in your live blog updates:

Invite Guest Contributors

Ask some of your top community members to contribute a few short posts. Make sure to give them some broad guidelines (e.g. please make sure your updates are at least 250 words and relate directly to the event we are covering).

Respond To Social Media Posts

Take inspiration from the news media here – look for sharp disagreements. Are you seeing a large group of people making negative comments about your event? Posting a short response to your critics can be helpful in some circumstances. If the negativity is too extreme, look for other posts to react to. For example, what quotes are people sharing from your keynote speaker’s presentation?

Get The Right Technology To Leverage UGC In Live Events

Knowing the right strategies and tactics is a vital starting point to leveraging user generated content in your events. However, curating and using this content without the right technology can quickly get time-consuming. Learn more about how Arena’s products can leverage user generated content into your events. Find out how to be prepared for live events using Arena Content Manager for Live Blog.

15 Virtual Event Ideas for Young Professionals

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There are several virtual event ideas that can help you engage your younger employees. Attracting and retaining young professionals is difficult because talented people have more career opportunities in today’s tight labor market. Virtual events have an important supporting role if your organization has the basics, like offering competitive compensation and flexibility.

How To Use This Guide

Selecting the right virtual event ideas for young professionals depends on a few factors. These event ideas take significant time, creativity, and effort. On the other hand, some of these event ideas are relatively simple and easy to implement. 

Keep your organization’s familiarity with virtual events as you explore this list. Companies that are highly experienced in running virtual events, online conferences and live streams may be able to take on more complex events. If you’re getting started with virtual events, then focus your efforts on a more straightforward event concept.

Virtual Networking Events for Young Professionals

For young professionals, producing networking events is critical. Put yourself in the shoes of a newly hired employee. They may have graduated a year ago and moved to a new city. They may not know many people or feel disconnected from others. Offering one or two virtual networking opportunities yearly is an excellent starting point.

1. Virtual Coffee Chats

This virtual event is best suited for companies that hire significant numbers of young professionals. For example, technology companies, professional services firms, and financial firms tend to hire large numbers of new graduates each year. In other words, this event is a good fit if your organization has a campus or college recruiting program.

Invite all young professionals who have been hired in the past five years to the event. Suggest an icebreaker game like two truths and a lie to spark the conversation.

2. Meet The Leadership Virtual Event

Many newer professionals are ambitious to grow their careers. One of the best ways to grow is to meet people who have already accomplished your career goals. Offering a “meet the leaders” networking event is smart. Invite the CEO and another few senior executives to an event and randomly mix them with young professionals.

Who knows – your CEO might see untapped potential in some of your new hires and put them on the fast track to contribute more to the company!

3. Virtual Industry Networking Events

As a young professional, it’s vital to network beyond your employer. After all, some of the best opportunities in life may come from partnerships and interactions with friends at other companies. With this event concept, consider crafting a guest list of young professionals from similar companies. For example, a young professional group at Deloitte might invite peers from other accounting firms like PwC, EY, and KPMG to a virtual mixer.

4. Virtual Networking With Guest Speaker

What if your prior efforts to organize networking efforts fell flat? It may be time to try a new strategy. This event idea involves inviting a special guest whose name recognition will draw in people. Depending on your network and budget, there are a few ways to execute this strategy.

Invite A Recently Promoted Young Professional

Sometimes, it can be challenging to relate to people who are very different from you. For example, a 25-year-old new hire might not relate to an executive who has been in the workforce for 25 years! The alternative is to look for a professional in the 25-30 year age bracket who has been promoted or earned an award. Invite them to give a short presentation to spark interest in the networking event.

Invite A Relevant Academic Expert

Young professionals, especially recent graduates, often look up to the expertise of professors and other academics. Reach out to your local college’s business school and ask if any of the professors are interested in giving a presentation to your audience. For the best results, suggest some topics like workplace communication, networking, or financial skills.

Virtual Company Book Club

Young professionals have a lot to learn about how your company works. Tap into that desire to learn by organizing a book club. For example, a group of young professionals specializing in technology might be interested in discussing the book “The Personal MBA” by Josh Kaufman, which covers many different business topics.

Young Professional Virtual Recruiting Event Ideas

Some companies, like Google and Apple, are overwhelmed with new job applicants every time they post a new position. The rest of us have to take a different strategy – offering to recruit events to connect with these potential hires. 

1. Virtual Company Tour

While remote and hybrid working arrangements are popular, the office experience still plays an important role. Young professionals want to see what your office is like and the amenities and have a sense of what it would be like to work at your location. 

A virtual company tour is a relatively simple event idea. In essence, you share photos and videos of your office location with virtual attendees. Depending on your comfort level, there are a few ways to execute this idea. For example, you could ask employees to submit a few photos of themselves at the office. Or you could take employees on a virtual tour by sharing a live stream video from a smartphone.

What if you have a small office? Combining this event idea with the next one on our list might be worthwhile.

2. Virtual Intern Fair

Completing an internship or two is a valuable experience to start your career as a graduate or student. It lets a young professional take your company for a “test drive,” and you get the opportunity to see them at work. Assuming your company has an intern program or an interest in starting one, a virtual intern fair is a helpful way to engage potential talent.

To market your company’s internship program, keep the following tips in mind:

  • Compensation: Intern pay varies widely. If your company can offer a competitive intern compensation package, that is a great point to highlight in this virtual event.
  • Experiences: potential interns are looking for the opportunity to grow their networks and earn valuable skills. Look for ways to present your program’s unique experiences, such as the opportunity to research emerging technologies or interact with management.
  • What Happens After The Internship: every internship comes to an end, so what’s next? Invite your past interns to speak about their experiences – did they get job offers or find other ways to grow your career?

3. Virtual Partnership Program

Competition for talent is heating up in many industries, including technology. It’s no longer good enough to rely on job postings or recruiters alone. Look for opportunities to partner with associations and programs. These organizations can also help your company achieve its diversity and inclusion goals. For example, reach out to organizations like Wonder Women Tech and LGBTQ Tech.

By partnering with a diverse professional organization, your company will have the opportunity to attract more qualified talent. This type of partnership event is most likely to succeed if your company can highlight relevant past hires and other efforts to engage diverse talent.

4. Online Hackathon Events

What if your company had the opportunity to see young professionals at work building something? That’s precisely what running or sponsoring a hackathon event can do for you! Many leading companies like Amazon, Capital One, Coinbase, Intel, and have previously sponsored hackathon events. It’s a powerful way to connect with ambitious creative talent in the technology industry.

There are two ways to execute this virtual event idea. The simple option is to partner with an existing program like Major League Hacking. Alternatively, if your organization has a substantive 

5. Online Charitable Events

Many companies have charitable programs and encourage employee volunteerism. These efforts are a great way to connect with community-minded young professionals. Traditionally, community service efforts were performed in person, like building homes or cleaning public areas. 

To bring your charitable efforts into the digital world, look for opportunities to give back that can be performed online. For example, education volunteers can digitally help tutor students in math, science, and languages (e.g., English as a second language). In addition, you might partner with an organization that supports new immigrants entering the workforce. 

Team Building Virtual Events For Young Professionals

The first few virtual events examples will help you recruit young professionals. Once they’re hired, employee engagement and growth become more critical. Use these virtual event ideas to help newer hires grow their networks, enhance team building and cohesion and bring fun to the workplace.

1. Virtual Happy Hour Event

Gathering together to enjoy drinks and food is one of the most popular ways to build cohesion with your team members. With a hybrid or remote working world, gathering in person isn’t always an option. As an alternative, invite your young professionals to a virtual happy hour. To make the event even more appealing, offer a gift card so that your attendees can bring their drinks. 

A virtual happy hour is one of the most straightforward virtual event ideas to organize because it is unstructured. The downside is that not all employees will be interested or available to join this event. That’s why we have a few more event ideas for you!

2. Virtual Murder Mystery Event

Want to give your young professionals the chance to channel their inner Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie? Give them the chance to exercise their problem-solving skills in a new way by organizing a virtual murder mystery. These group experiences have been brought into the online world with games like Red Herring Games’ Virtual Murder Mystery Parties. You can also work with a facilitator to make the event memorable. 

3. Virtual Comedy Hour

Solving a mystery isn’t everybody’s cup of tea… But laughter is good for everyone! Mayo Clinic research suggests laughter can help with stress relief. There are a few ways to put together this event.

Spotlight Your Employees

Young professionals don’t always get the chance to impact everyone at work. That’s why giving new hires the chance to share a comedy set can work so well. Of course, you might want to set a few ground rules, like keeping the company’s values and code of conduct, to keep the event safe and enjoyable for all.

Bring In A Virtual Comedian

Performing live comedy, especially when unfamiliar to you, can be stressful. If your employees aren’t interested in performing, there’s another way to bring comedy benefits to your company. Bring in a “corporate comedian” – these specialized entertainers know how to bring the laughs while engaging the needs of corporate audiences. Look at companies like Clean Comedians and Treuer Laughs to discover your options. 

4. Virtual Fitness Competition

Sitting at your desk all day is a drag, so this virtual event can help to solve that challenge. Organize a fitness competition for young professionals and see who can log the most minutes of activity over a month. While most fitness activities will take offline, you can bring people together for a few virtual event touchpoints. At the start of the competition, invite participants to a kickoff event and explain how the event works. When the competition is over, organize another virtual event and give out awards for employees who log the best results!

5. Virtual Worksgiving Event

Thanksgiving is one of the year’s most significant events. Young professionals might need to travel to be with their families for this event. A few days before the holiday, organize a virtual worksgiving event. During the event, invite employees to share how they mark the holiday. In addition, you could also focus on the gratitude aspect of Thanksgiving – what do employees feel grateful for?

For more inspiration and ideas on how to run this type of event, see this resource: How to plan a virtual Worksgiving for your employees.

Get The Right Technology To Engage Young Professionals

For your virtual event for professionals to succeed, communication and engagement are critical. Video chat is part of the story, but remember that not all employees want to use video all the time. Give your employees the chance to engage using chat! Learn more about Arena Live Chat.

Could Budweiser Profit Despite World Cup Sponsorship Disappointment

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Put yourself in Budweiser’s shoes for a moment. The beer company has spent at least $75 million to sponsor the World Cup, one of the largest sporting events of the year. The company probably thought selling beer in Qatar, known for its strict alcohol prohibitions, would be difficult, but thought they had reached an agreement to sell alcohol in the stadiums, and other select areas. Then Qatar decided to ban alcohol sales in stadiums less than 48 hours before the start of the first game. AB InBev’s now deleted tweet, “well, this is awkward”, pretty much sums up their sentiment…

Without question, it’s disappointing news. As marketers who market to marketers, our hearts go out to the hard-working teams at Budweiser who have spent months, if not years working toward the 2022 World Cup (not to mention the fans who just want a beverage!). It’s not just beer companies that are worried, either. The Guardian reports that several other World Cup sponsors have “ brought up contractual concerns with Fifa following its late decision to ban alcohol from stadiums during the World Cup.”

Seeking compensation or other solutions through the legal process will take time. Regardless of the outcome, what else can Budweiser do? To answer this question, we’re turning to an unexpected place – wisdom from a long-dead Roman Emperor.

The Obstacle Is The Way: The Surprising Solution From A Roman Emperor

In his best-selling book, “The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph,” Ryan Holiday presents Stoic wisdom from ancient Greece and Rome. The book’s title is based on an observation from Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 CE).

Marcus Aurelius wrote the following in Meditations, his book of reflections:

Our actions may be impeded… but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our understanding. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Marcus was one of the most influential people who ever lived. Yet, he suffered great disappointments and frustrations, like a trusted friend betraying him and struggling through the Antonine Plague (which lasted for 15 years). With these Stoic principles in mind, what can brands like Budweiser do when they face disappointment?

5 Ways Budweiser Can Turn Its World Cup Trial Into Triumph 

No company, let alone a major event sponsor, wants to see its products prohibited from sale at a significant event. These ideas are no substitute for the company’s lost sales. Yet they may help the company to thrive in the future and find even more excellent opportunities.

1) Gain New Insights For Marketing In Alcohol Restricted Markets

Laws and social customs restrict alcohol consumption in many countries around the world. An estimated 14 countries, including Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Iran, Kuwait, and the Maldives, prohibit or, significantly limit alcohol sales. 

Yet, there are millions of consumers in those markets. Traditional beer advertising campaigns are not well suited to these countries.

As the World Cup unfolds, we encourage Budweiser to pay close attention to how fans – locals and international alike – engage with its Budweiser Zero product. Ask staff on the ground to see how consumers like its alcohol-free product.  For example, there may be new ideas to leverage – like being able to drink a lot during the competition without putting on weight!

2) Leverage Sober Curious Audience

For an alcoholic beverage company, the growth of the sober curious trend may be problematic. The market research firm Nielsen found that 21% of US consumers cut back on alcohol consumption in 2021. The key drivers for this behavior change include losing interest in drinking alcohol, going out less, and wanting to live a healthier lifestyle.

The sober trend is even more eye-opening when considering it from a demographic trend. Several research studies have found that Millennials, the largest US demographic, drink less than older generations. Generation Z adults are also telling researchers that they plan to consume less alcohol.

These trends present an opportunity to promote Budweiser Zero. In fact, Budweiser might go a step further and position its product against soft drinks. Budweiser has 50 calories, while a standard 330 ml (11.1 fluid ounces) cane of Coca-Cola Original has 139 calories. For consumers interested in losing weight or pursuing other health goals, Budweiser Zero might be a good fit. 

3) Find Inspiration For More Inclusive Marketing

Many traditional alcoholic beverage advertisements show people enjoying life while drinking. (We get it, drinking beer can be fun!) Yet, many people don’t want to drink alcohol. They might not like the taste, avoid alcohol for health or religious reasons or simply prefer other drinks.

Instead of advertising that subtly pressures everyone to drink alcohol, see this World Cup disappointment as an opportunity. Picture this – a commercial showing a couple planning a party and debating what drinks to offer. They could start with beer and then recall, “Hey, what are we going to serve to other people who don’t drink?” 

4) Lean Into The Disappointment Angle

It might not be the healthiest habit, but sometimes enjoying a beer after hearing awful news just feels right. Other brands have directly referenced disappointments in the news to significant effect. For example, Oreo famously created the dunk in the dark tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl when a power outage impacted the game. That fast Tweet received over 6,000 likes and more than 13,000 retweets.

There are a few ways to use World Cup disappointment as fuel. The direct approach: create marketing featuring the disappointed Budweiser staffers drowning their sorrows with their favorite beer! The indirect approach offers an alternative if that feels too on the nose.  

Create marketing campaigns around a series of disappointments like:

  • Your favorite team didn’t win the championship.
  • You didn’t get the bonus or raise you wanted.
  • You got injured playing sports.

Build a series of ads around each disappointment and then end with friends coming together to cheer up their friend with a peer. The message is simple: Budweiser is there for you when your life throws disappointment your way. Budweiser wouldn’t want to condone irresponsible drinking! Enjoy a single beer and company.

5) Play The Long Game Virtually

What if Budweiser had an environment where World Cup-style surprises simply couldn’t happen? Even better, what if that environment could accommodate vast numbers of beer fans from all over the world? That’s all possible by creating a virtual community directly on Budweiser websites. With Arena Live Chat installed, beer and sports fans can gather together to celebrate their favorite drinks and sports.

We get that suggesting brands like Budweiser “take their audience home” is self-serving, since our technology enables this, but it’s more than just a self-promotional tactic. The reality is that, like regional governments, 3rd party social media platforms can also change their minds about what’s allowed or not allowed on their feeds and betting your business, or $75M marketing campaign, on platforms that can disable your content with the flick of a switch may not be the best forward facing strategy. 

Discover How To Build A Own Disruption-Proof Virtual Community

The silver lining for AB InBev here is that they’re getting a lot of “free”global publicity. Was it worth the $75M, probably not, but, on the flip side, here we are, a SaaS company, writing a blog about beer. And there’s a lesson for every brand, publisher and influencer here: don’t trust your livelihood, and budgets, to organizations (political or technical) that can turn off your programs with the flip of a switch. 

At Arena, we believe the technology, and the time, have arrived at a point where marketers CAN take their audience back from social media, and evolve their own, digital properties with social-media-like experiences that drive community led growth. Want to see how it works? Check out our world cup coverage page, or, if you’d like to learn more Contact Arena today to find out how you can grow a digital community on your own website – an asset that can’t be taken away from you!

Create Your Live World Cup Coverage for Every Game

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Here at Arena, we’re big fans of football / soccer, so we used some of our out-of-the-box features to create live feed coverage of all the games in the World Cup. If you’re in media, publishing, or just a huge fan, we’ll show you how to do this on your site as well. This is a fun way to cover the event, even if you don’t have people on-site, but can also help you boost digital property metrics like average session time, registration rate or even CTR for direct or programmatic sponsorships.

Step 1: Create a free account

To build a custom version of this, you’ll need an arena account, or you can just DM us in the chat on any of the pages and we can send you the snippet you can add to any webpage or app. Still, creating an account is easy and free: just click here.

Step 2: Create an event for a match

We bet this is simpler than you picture. When you create a sports event in the Arena Dashboard, you can already pick “soccer”, the exact tournament you’ll cover – World Cup, in this case – and the list of matches will come right up!

This is when you can enable automatic sports features that make your life much easier:

  • Countdown the match
  • Live score update
  • Automatic play-by-play

These are features that will work automatically and set you free from updating everything that happens in a game, like goals, yellow cards and substitutions.

Step 3: Embed the Live Blog in your web page

Next thing is to add the embed code in your page. It’s usually just a copy-and-paste process, but it can vary depending on the platform you use (WordPress, Webflow, etc). If you have any difficulties, check Arena’s Help site.

Step 4: Add some social accounts for automated publishing

To create a live experience that also filters for more brand-safe content, we set two high level filters:

  1. We pulled in any twitter post with the hashtags #WorldCupQatar2022, #Qatar2022, #WorldCup, etc but set a filter for only accounts with over 1,000,000 followers. This gives us global reach that can pull from any publisher, influencer or player post, but also ensures random garbage doesn’t clutter the feed.
  2. We selected several official accounts, like FIFA World Cup, FourFourTwo, ESPN, etc to pull in any of their posts related to World Cup.

Next we add the countdown clock, then set live score counter to auto update. Now, anyone who comes to the page early will know when the experience will go fully live, but, for our team, it was basically “set it and forget it”.

Step 5: Enable the Live Chat

For engagement, we added a Live Chat to the right side which allows the community to engage with each other when the match starts. Since we’re NOT a publisher, and our website traffic is much lower than, say, pretty much any online media company, we opted to create a single chat that spans over every game, but, we could just as easily have created dedicated chats for specific game audiences. For high traffic sites, setting different chats for different segments of your audience can be a good idea.

Step 6: Add Conversion Cards for CTAs

After that, we added direct calls to action with Conversion Cards. For our purposes, we added two:

  1. For our fun Chrome extension
  2. For our new publishing solutions page

For these, we’re basically just promoting some cool content we made, but these could just as easily have been sponsored ads from partners, or even programmatic ads from a DSP.

Finally, we just toggled which match we wanted & copied and pasted this on to different pages and within about an hour, we had set up live coverage experiences for every game in the World Cup. For a list of all the pages, please see below!

World Cup calendar and live coverage links

Group Stage‍

Nov-20 Qatar vs Ecuador

Nov-21 England vs Iran

Nov-21 Senegal vs Netherlands

Nov-21 United States vs Wales

Nov-22 Argentina vs Saudi Arabia

Nov-22 Denmark vs Tunisia

Nov-22 Mexico vs Poland

Nov-22 France vs Australia

Nov-23 Morocco vs Croatia

Nov-23 Germany vs Japan

Nov-23 Spain vs Costa Rica

Nov-23 Belgium vs Canada

Nov-24 Switzerland vs Cameroon

Nov-24 Uruguay vs South Korea

Nov-24 Portugal vs Ghana

Nov-24 Brazil vs Serbia

Nov-25 Wales vs Iran

Nov-25 Qatar vs Senegal

Nov-25 Netherlands vs Ecuador

Nov-25 England vs United States

Nov-26 Tunisia vs Australia

Nov-26 Poland vs Saudi Arabia

Nov-26 France vs Denmark

Nov-26 Argentina vs Mexico

Nov-27 Japan vs Costa Rica

Nov-27 Belgium vs Morocco

Nov-27 Croatia vs Canada

Nov-27 Spain vs Germany

Nov-28 Cameroon vs Serbia

Nov-28 South Korea vs Ghana

Nov-28 Brazil vs Switzerland

Nov-28 Portugal vs Uruguay

Nov-29 Netherlands vs Qatar

Nov-29 Ecuador vs Senegal

Nov-29 Iran vs United States

Nov-29 Wales vs England

Nov-30 Tunisia vs France

Nov-30 Australia vs Denmark

Nov-30 Poland vs Argentina

Nov-30 Saudi Arabia vs Mexico

Dec-1 Croatia vs Belgium

Dec-1 Canada vs Morocco

Dec-1 Japan vs Spain

Dec-1 Costa Rica vs Germany

Dec-2 South Korea vs Portugal

Dec-2 Ghana vs Uruguay

Dec-2 Cameroon vs Brazil

Dec-2 Serbia vs Switzerland

Round of 16

Dec-3 Netherlands vs United States

Dec-3 Argentina vs Australia

Dec-4 England vs Senegal

Dec-4 France vs Poland

Dec-5 Japan vs Croatia

Dec-5 Brazil vs South Korea

Dec-6 Morocco vs Spain

Dec-6 Portugal vs Switzerland

Quarter-Finals

Dec-9 Netherlands vs Argentina

Dec-9 Croatia vs Brazil

Dec-10 Morocco vs Portugal

Dec-10 England vs France

Semi-Finals

Dec-13 Argentina vs Croatia

Dec-14 France vs Morocco

Play-off For Third Place

Dec-17 Croatia vs Morocco

Final

Dec-18 Argentina vs France

Check Out Arena Live Blog Live Updates With World Cup Content From Social Media

Arena Android and iOS SDK November 2022 updates

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Arena has two big news for iOS and Android developers – we’ve updated our SDKs. This means that Arena Live Chat & Live Blog can be added and enhanced in the most used mobile platforms in the world.

What’s new for Android developers?

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Android developers can now add Polls and Q&A to their Arena Live Chat. This helps businesses increase engagement as well as get valuable insights from their customers. It’s also important to note that these new SDK features are only available to our Enterprise customers, but they are already included in the web version.

What’s new for iOS developers?

Arena’s iOS SDK allows developers to add Arena Live Chat to their apps with one of the most powerful engagement tools: Polls. This offers a great opportunity for businesses to increase retention, engagement and conversion by providing a more interactive experience. Plus, it gives businesses another way to collect valuable insights with an extra layer of real-time interaction.

Arena’s new SDK features: Polls & Q&A

About Polls

Arena Live Chat has a Polls feature, which allows to gather audience feedback, identify important topics for your users, and gain insight into what they think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDBpllB64lg

About Q&A

The Q&A is an Arena Live Chat feature that provides real-time engagement with users and gathers all of their questions and opinions in a moderation queue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnPfQUdy2oA

Conclusion

Arena is committed to helping businesses provide the best possible user experience. Our latest update is just another example of how we’re working to make that happen. We hope that these new features will help our customers increase audience retention, engagement, and conversion.

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Preparing for Live Virtual Events with Arena Content Manager

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Preparing engaging live virtual events is a powerful way to engage your audience. With an engaged audience, advertising revenue, lead generation, and sales all become easier. Offering virtual events bring a lot of benefits. Yet, it can be stressful to organize these events. Fortunately, you can ease the burden on your team by preparing with the right team.

The Benefits of Preparing Live Virtual Events

Spending time organizing your live virtual events is critical for several reasons. 

Minimize Audience Distractions.

Does this sound familiar? You’ve put serious effort into marketing your event and attendance looks good. Then, a few minutes into the event, the timing starts to fall apart. Your event moderator keeps having to fill air time while your team gets links, images and polls ready. Some of your most loyal fans may give you the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, many in your audience will open new tabs in their browsers and disengage from your event. 

With robust virtual event planning, you can avoid the above distractions. As a result, your audience is more likely to stay focused on your content and the community experience.

Increase Positive Word of Mouth

Almost every organization wants to grow its audience. Whether you are looking for leads, potential students, donors, or sales, more people in your engaged audience is vital. Offering a live virtual event with professional-level quality means your audience is more likely to tell their friends. In addition, event attendees are more likely to tell friends and family about your events. Excellent live event preparation makes you more likely to achieve your viral growth goals.

Increase Repeat Attendance

To compete successfully today, it’s becoming crucial to offer multiple events. You might decide to focus all of your energy on a single high-end virtual event or hold events more frequently. We recommend holding events quarterly or monthly because that will give your team more practice in preparing, marketing, and executing events. In addition, it is easier to form a meaningful connection with your audience when you engage them repeatedly.

When each event is well-produced and engaging, you can only realize the benefit of repeated attendance – a deeper connection with your audience.

To get these benefits, preparation is essential. To save time on that process, leverage Arena Content Manager.

Getting Ready With Arena Content Manager Step By Step

Arena Content Manager is a management solution you can use to make your live virtual events run smoothly. There are a few ways to use Content Manager to streamline your event planning and lift engagement. Let’s cover three scenarios where Content Manager can save your event team time.

Optimizing The Virtual Conference Experience With Arena Content Manager

Virtual events and hybrid events are fast becoming popular ways to engage audiences, share your insights and grow your community. Successfully executing a virtual event focused on valuable content with few or no glitches is easier with Content Manager. Let’s say you’re running a virtual conference next month. Here are some ways you can use Arena Content Manager before, during and after your virtual conference.

Before The Virtual Conference

Think ahead to the event about the content assets you’ll need to engage your audience. For example, your guest speakers might have slide decks. In a less formal content, the speakers and event host might simply have a list of bullet points for what they plan to cover. Based on this information, load content assets to Arena Content Manager so that you can easily use them when the event happens.

Use the following tips to accelerate your content brainstorming process:

  • Images: do you have images of all of the speakers, presenters and guests? It’s best to load these into the Content Manager so you can easily introduce each new person.:
  • Videos: displaying a short video is often a good way to add variety to a virtual conference. If you use videos, remember to use them occasionally and keep them short because a virtual conference is at its best when it is interactive.
  • GIFs. There are only so many keynote speakers and panel discussions your audience can absorb. We suggest creating a few light-hearted GIF images for your event. Sharing these images during breaks can help to keep engagement high.
  • Social Content. You can create and save social media posts in Arena Content Manager. For example, you might create quote tweets sharing highlights from your star keynote speaker in advance. Then you can publish these posts as the event is unfolding.

In addition to the content above, give some thought to your primary objectives for the virtual conference. For example, are you seeking to create opportunities for the sales team? Or do you want to encourage people to buy products (e.g. event recordings, subscriptions or other items)? You may also want to create assets to support your primary call to action (e.g. create a visual that displays your call to action URL to reinforce the words of your presenters).

Preparing content assets ahead of time is also a powerful way to ensure the online event stays aligned with your event. If your team is under pressure to produce event content when the event unfolds, mistakes are more likely to happen. There’s nothing wrong with some improvisation but asking your event staff to come up with event content in real-time is stressful! 

In the example below, we’re mentioned creating new content assets. If you’re running your first-ever virtual conference, you may have to start from scratch. However, if you are running a series of events over time (e.g. a quarterly invite-only conference for VIPs in your audience), there are probably content assets you can reuse. Any asset you upload to Arena Content Manager can be used repeatedly, so your team will get more efficient every time you run an event. 

During The Virtual Conference

As your virtual conference starts, your event team can breathe easy. They’ve already created and saved multiple assets to use during the event. For the best results, it’s helpful to have 2-3 people to support the event in addition to your event host. One person to provide technical support, one person to use the assets you’ve created in content manager and another person to interact with your audience in live chat. With this small team, you’ll have everything you need to keep your participants engaged. 

As the virtual event unfolds, remember your event goals. For example, if you want to grow your paid subscriber base, consider making custom offers for your audience (e.g. get 15% off an annual subscription when you subscribe before the event ends). 

Create and Optimize Your Live Virtual Events Workflow With Your Team

Learning the art of running successful online events takes time and practice. Whether you have a dedicated events team or not, it’s helpful to build a virtual events workflow for your team. Use the following checklist to emphasize planning and preparation with Arena Content Manager in your workflow.

1. Discuss Your Event Goals

Before you start promoting the event or creating content assets, everybody on the team needs to be crystal clear on goals. For instance, are there one or two event metrics that you will focus on? It’s often helpful to balance quantity and quality metrics. If your goal is to create leads for the sales team, track the number of inbound leads and how many of these leads become qualified.

2. Create Your Pre-Event Content Assets in Arena Content Manager

Now that you know your event goal, it’s time to create your assets in Arena Content Manager. As mentioned before, you can reuse content assets from previous events, your website and other sources. Focus your efforts on creating materials that directly support your primary goal (e.g. encouraging attendees to sign up for your event series, email list, etc).

3. Assign Roles and Responsibilities To The Event Team

Now you have your event material created in Arena Content Manager, make sure your team knows what they are responsible for. In most cases, there are a few roles to cover including:

  • Event host. This is the person who is on the virtual stage to welcome attendees, introduce speakers and keep the event moving.
  • Technical Support. Glitches and problems occasionally arise in virtual events, so it’s wide to have a technical support person on call for the event.
  • Event Support: this role is responsible for using the content created in Content Manager effectively such as sharing images and videos with attendees.
4. Run The Event & Meet With The Event Team Afterward

The final steps of the workflow are to run the event and gather insights after the event. For example, ask your team if there are other kinds of assets you can create for your next event. The opposite may be true as well – those GIFs you created might be well suited to your specific type of event. Keep these lessons in mind as you prepare for your next event.

Start Using Arena Content Manager Now

You can find the Arena Content Manager directly in your Arena Dashboard. Simply sign into your account and start adding assets. The assets you drag and drop into Content Manager will be ready for you to use whenever you log back into Arena.

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Want more live blog SEO traffic? Use this 2 part strategy

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Improving your SEO with a Live Blog is simple when you have the right process. To help users to attract more organic traffic, we’ve broken the process down into two steps. The first step is technical SEO: configuration and technical matters that make your website highly readable for users. Once that foundation is set up, the second step of the process is to focus on strategy and content. Both activities are critically important because search engine optimization needs to meet the needs of people and work with search engines.

Technical SEO Foundations For Your Live Blog

The following steps to configure your website and live blog so that Google and other search engines can easily and quickly crawl your website. Without this foundation, your website’s live blog is unlikely to be noticed, indexed, and put in front of people searching for information.

Step 1: Install Arena on your website

The way you install Arena depends on your technology. For WordPress websites, use the Arena WordPress plugin. The WordPress plugin handles the technical SEO aspects of your live blog.

For organizations that have a different backend, there are a few options:

Don’t see your CMS or backend technology covered? Contact Arena to discuss your options.

Step 2: Verify your schema is valid

For liveblogs we add the markups based on schema.org specifically for that type of content. You can read more about it here.

Use Google’s free structured data testing tool to verify that your Arena integration is working properly. If the testing tool fails, contact Arena for assistance.

Step 3: Review your website’s overall technical SEO performance.

At this point, you have set up Arena Live Blog. At the same time, your website probably has other technologies, apps, and plugins in place for performance, SEO, marketing, security, and other objectives. It’s important to review your overall website from a technical SEO perspective.

By using an SEO tool like SEMrush, you can review your website for common problems such as:

  • Website speed. Everything being equal, faster websites tend to outperform slower websites. In other words, load time has a direct impact on your organic traffic and search rankings. Make it a priority to periodically test your speed. Use 3rd party tools like Pagespeed Insights.
  • Mobile Devices. Your website’s customer experience on phones and other mobile devices should also be fast and easy to use. A poor mobile website may have a negative impact on SEO.
  • Broken Links. Identifying and fixing broken links is an important way to provide a good user experience and show that your website is well maintained by search engines. 
  • Security. Reducing your security risk by using HTTPS (Hypertext transfer protocol secure) is important. Check to make sure your website and any other key domains use it.
  • Review Keyword Optimization For Key Pages. On larger websites, you might have thousands or even millions of pages! Reviewing all of those pages in detail may not be realistic. Start by reviewing your top 10 or 20 pages by traffic to save time. At a minimum, verify that keywords in title tags are correct. Your keyword usage should also align with your overall content marketing strategy.

Step 4: Set a reminder to review your technical SEO

Achieving SEO success is a work in process. That’s why we recommend setting a reminder to review your technical SEO a year from now. For example, your content and strategy may change to emphasize international products which may require an update to your website structure. Therefore, set a reminder to review your website for technical SEO annually. If you work with SEO consultants or agencies, they may be able to help you optimize your website performance more frequently.

Creating Your Strategy And Content For Your Live Blog

The technical SEO blog set up is the foundation and frame of your home on the Internet. The next phase brings your website to life with engaging content that directly contributes to your organization’s goals. 

Step 1: What do your customers want to know?

Knowing your audience is the foundation of a successful content strategy. When a blog post or other page on your website provides answers to search queries, you’re more likely to attract customers. As customers and search engines start to view your website as a resource for relevant content, reading time will go up and it will become easier to reach your growth goals.

Take some time to review your buyer personas to remind yourself of what your audience wants from your website. For example, are your customers looking for the latest political news? Alternatively, your customers might be looking for ways to connect with other people who share their interests. Your website’s analytics will give you some answers to these questions – look at the pages and resources generating the most engagement and leads. Depending on your audience, you might have hundreds or thousands of keyword ideas at this point.

Your content should align with your business goals. Consider the specific problems you can solve for customers. This might include questions about how your product or service compares to competitors. Or advice to achieve goals. 

Step 2: What is your most successful online content?

The next strategic step to improve your live blog SEO results is to look at your website and determine what’s working right now. Open your analytics app (e.g. Google Analytics) and look at the pages that have the most traffic and are producing the most conversions. You can also study your social media analytics to come up with additional ideas.

Aim to come up with a minimum of three content ideas that have resonated with your market. We’ll build a live blog around those themes next.

Step 3: Develop a Live Blog event concept

It’s time to develop your live blog plan! Many of the most successful live blogs focus on news coverage where there is rapid change. Journalists use live blogs to cover news content like elections, high-profile cases, and conflicts. Companies can use live blogs to cover industry news, product launches, and company events.  

It’s still possible to run a live blog without a connection to a breaking news event, but it may be more difficult to get your audience engaged. Fortunately, the next step will help to pull in your audience.

Step 4: Promote your Live Blog event

You’ve come up with your live blog idea that speaks to your audience and considers your business goals. Now, it is vital to promote your live blog to your audience! For example, if your live blog relates to a company conference, make sure you mention your live blog. 

Step 5: Create your Live Blog 

At last, it’s time to start making posts to your live blog. As your team creates updates, keep a list of SEO keywords and themes on hand. Look for opportunities to weave those concepts into your live blog updates. 

Typically, a live blog will feature multiple updates per day. If your staff authors have limited capacity, consider bringing in a guest author to augment your team’s capabilities. News publishers do this all the time – they bring in special correspondents to enrich their news publishing. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtcEOAxv9jY

Step 6: Measure the SEO results of your Live Blog

In the weeks following your live blog event, open your analytics. It’s time to assess the results – did you attract more visitors? Did any of those visitors convert to your email list, purchase, or take another valuable action? If the answer is yes, start planning your next live blog concept so you can pull in more traffic. If the answer is no, check again in 30 days to allow the search engines to index your live blog content.

Achieving success in SEO takes practice. If your first live blog provided limited results, go back to the fundamentals to improve. For example, did your live blog offer unique insights that couldn’t be found elsewhere? Could you support your team better to use SEO concepts like keyword sets in their updates? Lastly, review your website’s technical setup to ensure that search engines can easily coral your website.

Grow Your Organic Traffic Today With A Live Blog

Content strategy and knowing your audience takes serious work and dedication. Fortunately, Arena is here to lighten the load. You can add a live blog to your website in a matter of minutes. Learn more about our Live Blog solution. You can get the free version today to see how the live blog works. Arena Live Blog supports both live updates and pre-planned content so that your content team wouldn’t get burned out.