Category Archives: Group Chat

How To Manage Live Chat Experiences

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Live experiences are a powerful way to connect more deeply with your community. With Arena, it’s easy to create new digital experiences quickly. Like any good story, there is a beginning, middle, and end to managing a live experience. We’ll guide you through each step, but first, there is an important question we need to answer.

Why Offer Live Experiences At All?

Creating an engaging live experience for your audience takes effort and resources. You might have experience running the occasional event or traditional digital marketing campaigns. There are a few reasons why offering live experiences to your audience is valuable.

1) Get Faster, Better Feedback From Your Audience

Without consistent feedback from your audience, it’s difficult to know if your marketing and experiences are working. Sure, tracking traditional metrics like conversions and engagement levels is helpful. It’s even better to get live feedback! 

Just imagine if you could show a product mockup to customers during a virtual event – that would give you far richer feedback than measuring the number of clicks on a page.

2) Thrive In The Post-Cookie Online World

Digital marketers and audience builders can’t rely on traditional cookies to understand audience behavior and interests. The solution, in brief, is to build a direct relationship with your audience (i.e., first-party data). For more insight on this change, see our post: The Future of Cookies In Marketing Strategy.

When your brand offers appealing social events using live chat, it becomes far easier to gather first-party data. That rich data is the foundation of success in the 2020s and beyond.

3) Deepen Audience Relationships

The final reason why offering live experiences matters comes down to relationships. Think back to the last conference you attended, like SaaStr Annual. You probably met lots of people, discovered new insights, and felt positive about the event. You can capture some of that event magic with engaging online experiences. By regularly running engaging live events, your audience will start to see your online presence as a community rather than simply a website.

Now that you see why it’s vital to provide live experiences to your audience, let’s start the planning process.

The Beginning Of Your Live Experience: Set Up Your Chat In Arena

Now you are ready to build your live chat experience in Arena. Use the following steps to set up and customize your live chat experience.

Step 1: Log in to your Arena account

Step 2: Click on Live Chat in the Arena dashboard.

Step 3: Click create a new chatroom.

Step 4: Name your chat (e.g., “Annual Launch Event”)

The chat name you select is for internal use only – chat participants will not be able to see this name.

Step 5: Select your chat status

There are two options: live and closed. The live option launches your chat session immediately and makes it available to everyone. On the other hand, if you want to be the only one who can post messages, choose closed.

Assuming you are planning a live experience for a future time, the closed status option is best. That means you can further customize the settings to your liking before making the live chat available to your audience.

Step 6: Choose your live chat settings

Arena gives you various ways to manage the experience depending on your needs. The list below includes some of the most significant options to keep in mind:

  • Language: choose the language your participants want to use.
  • Keep Chat Open: turn this option to make sure your chat is seen by the user.
  • Send direct messages: enabling this feature lets users send private messages to each other. It can be a helpful way to foster networking.
  • Pre-moderation: using this feature means that your team must approve messages before they approve. While it places more of a burden on your team, pre-moderation is a powerful way to support brand safety.
  • Sign-Up Options: you can choose Not Required (i.e., anybody can join), Sign Up Required (i.e., adds a minor speed bump to participation), or Single Sign On. The sign up option lets users enter an email address or use another credential (i.e. Facebook, Twitter or Google). 
  • Allow Slow Mode. In a live experience, you might have hundreds of participants and it’s easy to become overwhelmed when many people start posting messages. The slow mode lets you impose a delay between how often people can post messages (e.g. 10 seconds between messages). This mode is a helpful way to discourage harmful and distracting chat activity. If you use this mode, take a moment to explain it to your users at the start of the session. 
  • Allow Sharing Links: Choose whether you want to let participants share links. If you take other measures like requiring a sign-up or pre-moderation, allowing links is less risky. 
  • Profanity Filter: we recommend turning this feature on to maximize brand safety and avoid upsetting participants.

Navigating all of these options might take a few minutes the first time you use it. By the second or third time, you’ll a feel for which options are best suited to your audience. 

Once you have completed all of the settings to your liking, click the Create button at the bottom of the screen.

Step 7: Choose your Embed option

The embed option controls how Arena Live Chat appears on your website. There are a few options here: In-Page, Bottom, Side and Overlay. If you’re not sure which option to choose, we recommend overlay. 

When ready, click the “Copy” button at the bottom of this screen. This will generate a short piece of code for your website. To launch the live chat, this code needs to be added to your website. The specific steps vary depending on the type of website you have. For additional support, see our help guide: Adding Arena to your site.  

Step 8: Refresh your website and look for the live chat!

If you selected the live option in step 4, your live chat window will appear right away!

By the way, don’t worry about getting everything perfect the first time – you can go back and make updates whenever you want.

How To Run A Live Experience Like A Pro 

In our three-part story concept, running the live experience is the critical “middle” part of the story. Use the following tips to ensure your live chat experience runs smoothly.

Get Your Two Person Team Ready

It is usually wise to have at least two people involved in your live chat experience: an event host and a support person. The event host will focus on the conversation while the support person can address technical issues.

Have Your Scripts and Notes Available

When you run a live experience, you’re effectively on stage! It’s perfectly normal to have a bit of stage fright at first. One of the best ways to reduce anxiety is to prepare notes in advance and have them ready. Use our X resource to prepare your live experience script.

Join The Live Chat Early

Let’s say that your live event will run from 4 pm to 5 pm. It’s best to let people enter the virtual chat room at least 5 minutes before the event starts. Your staff should join early as well. Joining early means you can address technical questions quickly.

Explain Your Ground Rules

While optional, we recommend taking a minute or two to explain your ground rules for the live experience. This is especially important if you are using features like pre-moderation or profanity filters. Taking a moment to explain that you are offering a safe experience and that you will not tolerate abusive behavior will help to discourage disruptions.

Stick The Landing: Tips To End Your Live Experience Effectively

As your live chat experience comes to a close, schedule some time with your event team to explore the event. This is a critical continuous improvement discipline that ensures your live experiences will keep getting better over time. Use the following tips to run your post-live experience session with your team.

Recognize Successes

Kick off your post-chat review by celebrating what went well. For example, did you achieve a new milestone like 100 or 500 chat participants? Take a moment to praise your team for these developments.

What Worked Well?

Continuing on the positive theme, make a list of the practices that went well. For example, you might add three support people to keep a large event on track. Record these best practices and make sure you keep using them.

Gather “Stop Doing” Suggestions

Now, ask your team what you should stop doing or change for the future. To avoid blame and finger-pointing, emphasize changes that can be made for the future. 

Review The Live Chat Log

Finally, review the live chat log. In particular, look at questions directed to your company. If there are repeated questions like “why aren’t all of my questions appearing?” you may need to better explain your moderation practices.

Start Your Live Chat Experience This Week

Offering a live chat experience takes creativity and a team effort. Fortunately, the Arena Live Chat solution is simple and fast to install. On average, users take less than 15 minutes to install Arena on their website. Learn more about Arena Live Chat!

How To Use Chat Polls and Q&A To Grow Engagement

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Using chat polls and Q&A in an online chat are some of the best ways to boost engagement. Despite this fact, there’s a good chance that you’re not yet fully utilizing these tools. Overlooking these engagement tactics is To understand why let’s look at why engagement is so critical.

Why Chat Polls and Q&A Capabilities Are Critical 

In the past, digital marketers and publishers tend to focus on metrics like pageviews and cost per click. While helpful, those metrics scratch the surface. Focusing too much on these numbers can lead us away from more important goals like building an audience of fans eager to hear you.

Your entire marketing strategy will benefit from developing an engaged audience on your website. The pressure to convert cold traffic will ease. You will have a growing group of people who look forward to your website. Your audience will spread the word as you become more skilled in virtual event ideas. When your audience views your website as a place to engage socially, lead generation and higher advertising revenue.

The benefits of growing an engaged, loyal audience on your website are clear. With that in mind, it’s time to explore specific tactics to lift engagement further.

Audience Engagement Tactic 1: Chat Polls

Let me tell you a story about a webinar to understand why chat polls are helpful. Years ago, I was presenting a series of webinars to a group of professionals interested in project management. As I planned the presentation, I made assumptions about the audience’s interests. Yet, I wasn’t entirely sure about those guesses, so I used two quick audience polls in the first five minutes of the webinar. The result was a far better presentation for two reasons. First, I could better tailor the event to attendees’ level of knowledge. Second, the poll questions sparked a brief discussion in the chat app. 

Afterward, I made it a rule to constantly check for opportunities to use poll questions. It usually takes a few minutes of preparation to create good poll questions to lift engagement significantly.

How To Use Chat Polls To Grow Your Audience

Arena makes it simple to use polls to spark engagement with your audience. Use the following steps to create your chat polls.

Step 1: Log in to your Arena account

Step 2: Set up your Live Chat (optional)

You can skip this step if you have already created a live chat.

Step 3: Click on the Polls tab at the top.

Step 4: Write your poll questions and answers

Polls are typically structured as multiple choice questions. For example, you might ask online event attendees how many online conferences they have attended. In that case, the poll answers might be 0, 1, or more than 2.

As a rule of thumb, keep your poll question simple (i.e., a single sentence). The poll answers should also be simple with a maximum of 5 options, but you can add options if you wish. When polls get complicated, your audience may not want to make an effort to figure them out.

Step 5: Choose your schedule

The schedule option determines how long your poll is visible to participants. In shorter events like a one-hour presentation, we recommend keeping polls visible for 15 minutes. In more extended events like 1 or 2 day virtual or hybrid conferences, you might decide to leave polls open for longer (e.g., let participants see the poll and respond when the event takes a lunch break)

Step 6: Decide whether to show the number of votes.

This optional feature can help lift engagement further. The downside is that attendee responses might be influenced by seeing which answer is the most popular. Usually, that bias is not a problem.

Step 7: Save the poll as a draft or post it

After setting up your poll, you have two options: post or save it as a draft. Both of these options can be useful in different situations.

Post: When you click post, the poll immediately becomes available in the live chat session. If you just had an excellent idea for a poll during an event, use the post option to get that poll in front of your audience immediately.

Save as Draft: If your live chat event is in the future and you are simply getting everything ready, use the save as draft option. Your saved poll will be waiting for you whenever you decide to launch it. You can publish, edit or delete a saved poll at any time, so don’t worry about getting everything perfect.

Three Ideas To Use Chat Polls 

Now you know how to create, save and publish polls in Arena. That leaves just one question: what kind of polls should you create? The answer ultimately depends on the needs of your audience, your goals (e.g., a focus on lead generation vs. a different goal), and your business model. Use the following prompts to brainstorm additional ideas with your team.

1) Gather Audience Demographics

Thanks to your customer data platform, you may already have a good understanding of the demographics of your customer base. However, the specific individuals who show up to any given online event may be different. You may want to ask a few quick poll questions to understand your audience better. 

For example:

  • Customer Vs. Potential Customer: Create a poll to ask attendees if they have ever bought one of your products
  • Geography: Online events are potentially open to a global audience. Consider setting up a quick poll to see where attendees are located. This question is crucial because it can help you understand if your online events are reaching your audience at an appropriate time of day.

2) Check Interest In Future Events

Building an engaged online community takes effort over time. Market research will only take you far in developing winning events and chat experiences. Use a live chat poll to determine which event ideas to prioritize.

For example:

A college or university might ask the following poll question to deepen engagement with potential students.

Question: Which of the following event ideas are most interesting to you:

  • A) Meet successful alums from the college
  • B) Discover your financial aid options to pay for college
  • C) Take a virtual tour of the campus

3) Make Fast “In Flight” Changes

Maintaining engagement with your audience takes ongoing effort. You might sense that your audience is losing interest part of the way through your event. Setting up and running a quick poll can help to get your event back on track.

For example:

A company has set up a virtual conference to support the sales team. Fifteen minutes into the event, you notice that the live chat is starting to go quiet. Putting a poll question might help to reignite your audience’s engagement.

Question: What sales goals are you most excited about this year?

  • A) Getting promoted!
  • B) Getting into President’s Club
  • C) Closing my largest deal ever

Keep these live chat poll ideas in mind as you plan your next live chat event.

Audience Engagement Tactic 2: Question And Answer (Q&A) Experiences

Question and answer (Q&As) sessions are proven to connect with audiences. They have been used for years in traditional events. Executives, authors, lecturers, and others use Q&A time to connect. Find out how to use Arena’s Q&A capability to deepen connections with your audience.

How To Use Q&A To Boost Online Audience Engagement

Use this step-by-step guide to add a Q&A to your Arena Live Chat experience. The whole process just takes a few minutes.

1) Log in to your Arena account

2) In the Arena dashboard, click Live Chat and then choose the Live Chat you want to add a Q&A to

3) Click on the Q&A tab at the top of the screen

4) Click the “Enable Q&A” button

5) Turn on “pre-moderation” for Q&A (optional)

The pre-moderation feature means you get to control which of the submitted questions appear in the live chat. This optional feature is helpful in larger live chat experiences when you are hosting a VIP guest (e.g., the company CEO) or simply want to provide a curated experience for your attendees. 

To use Q&A moderation effectively, we recommend assigning this responsibility to a dedicated person. Let your main speaker or event MC stay focused on engaging the audience.

Four Ideas To Use Q&A In Live Chat

With the above steps, you’ve just learned how to add Q&A capabilities to your live chat. Like any tool, it’s helpful to know when and how to use this capability for the best results. Use the following prompts to devise thoughtful ways to use Q&A with your team.

1) Encourage Effective Audience Participation

When you host a live chat experience, you welcome an audience into your digital space. As the host, it’s up to you to set the ground rules. Setting those expectations includes guiding your audience on how to ask questions in a chat session effectively. For example, your audience might post dozens of questions, and you may only have time to answer a handful of questions. When your audience sees which questions get answered, they’ll engage even more effectively next time.

2) Leverage Moderated Q&A For A Safer Experience

In recent years, phishing, scams, bullying, and other harmful behaviors have become more common in the digital world. Despite those facts, there are practical steps you can take to make YOUR live chat safer for attendees. Specifically, turn on the Q&A moderation feature when it is vital to offer a safer experience, such as a live chat session with families. 

There’s another aspect to offering a safe experience – just think of hosting a virtual event with an important guest. For example, your CEO might join an event celebrating a significant company milestone like funding or launching a new product. In this setting, it’s essential to make your leaders look good! Use your judgment to decide which questions are approved. After the event ends, ask your guest if they want to see all of the questions to review privately.

3) Keep Large Live Chat Experiences Organized

Running a large-scale live chat experience is quite challenging. When you have hundreds or thousands of participants, simply keeping up with all the messages posted in the chat window can feel overwhelming. Using the Q&A capability is critically important in an event with many participants. The Q&A lets you separate questions from the general chat discussions. That means you can host a more focused Q&A session.

4) Review Q&A Content For Sales, Marketing, and Support

The first few benefits of running a Q&A in your live chat focus on immediate benefits. This benefit is focused on the long term. Arena’s event log history feature automatically captures all chat transcripts – including Q&As – so you can easily export the questions to review them later. 

The next day, invite a few sales, marketing, and customer support colleagues to review the questions with you. Some of the questions might be helpful to the sales team (e.g., “Is the product compatible with ABC technology?”). Other questions may help the marketing team craft an even better event in the future (e.g., several people suggested several social media influencers as guests for future online events). Still, other questions may indicate that potential customers are unclear about your shipping or return policies. Remember – just because a product feature or company policy seems obvious to your employees, it might feel confusing to your customers. Take the time to come up with detailed answers to these questions, and your next online event will be even more successful. 

Enhance Your Live Chat With Polls and Q&A Today

Adding live chat to your website makes your website more engaging. Unlocking the next level of audience engagement requires more engagement techniques. Arena Live Chat gives tools like polls, Q&A, and profanity filters to protect your brand. Learn more about Live Chat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=81ShIt6QuZ8

Discover how Arena Live Chat directly increases website revenue.

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What if you could bring new revenue to your business by engaging your audience more deeply? With Arena Live Chat, there are advertising and non-advertising methods to get more revenue from your website with Live Chat. Depending on your business model, you can use both methods to add new revenue streams to your company.

The Two Ways To Unlock New Revenue Streams Today 

There are two primary business models to earn revenue from an online property today: selling access to your audience to advertisers and using the audience to directly sell your products. 

Advertising Revenue Generation

The direct method is to sell advertising – a popular strategy used by major media brands, bloggers, and many others. There are multiple ways to generate advertising revenues. You can earn a fee for displaying ads (i.e., display advertising). Alternatively, you may earn a fee for recommending products (i.e., affiliate marketing). Some businesses generate revenue by creating sponsored content like reviews. These revenue streams require a creative approach, relevant advertising, and an engaged audience. Live chat can help you develop and grow your audience.

A key advantage of advertising revenue is that you do not need to create, manage or offer products or services of your own. Instead, you simply use an advertising platform (or make direct deals with advertisers) and start generating revenue! However, advertising revenue generation has its limitations. Advertising revenue tends to fluctuate throughout the year – the fall is often more active than the summer. In addition, your content and audience need to meet the needs of advertisers. If advertisers don’t like your website, they can go elsewhere.

Non-Advertising Revenue Generation

The other way to unlock revenue streams with live chat is to sell your products and services. The specific model you use will depend on how your business works. For example, an enterprise software company will likely be focused on lead generation for the sales team. On the other hand, a website with an online store may leverage live chat to sell its products directly.

Generating revenue directly from your audience is different from advertising. Generally speaking, you can earn much more revenue by selling your products. The downside is that you must invest in a sales and marketing process. For example, your audience may not be interested in buying an expensive product when they first hear about it. Instead, your sales team will probably need to reach out and engage leads. If you sell lower-priced products, following up with email marketing may be all you need.

The Core Ingredient Every Online Business Requires

An engaged and growing audience is the fuel that powers every online business. Without an audience interested in your content and online experiences, your growth possibilities become constrained. Without an audience, you will unlikely be able to generate meaningful advertising revenue. After all, why should an advertiser pay you if they don’t get access to a large audience?

A non-advertising business model can still operate without an audience. Yet, growth becomes far more complex. In essence, you will need to rely on other methods like an outbound sales program, advertising, and events. While all these methods work, they are more challenging to scale. In contrast, global brands like IBM, Accenture, and Goldman Sachs invest in building an engaged online audience. 

Whether your goal is to generate advertising revenue or sell your products, an engaged and growing audience is vital. Adding Arena Live Chat to your website is one of the best ways to nurture an engaged audience.

How Live Chat Chat Helps You To Grow Revenue

Using a live chat session to generate additional revenue (i.e., live chat monetization) is easy when you use the right tools. Arena Live Chat is a no-code tool you can install on most websites in a matter of minutes. You can use two approaches to live chat monetization: directly using Arena Live Chat monetization features or using live chat to grow an audience and monetize them differently.

Arena Live Chat helps you to grow audience engagement with a few key features:

  • Q&A: Hosting your CEO or a VIP at your live chat? Use the Q&A feature to gather questions and then ask your guest to answer the most significant questions. 
  • Direct messages: Your audience may not want to share everything directly in a public chat room – that’s why we offer direct messages so individuals can send messages to each other.
  • Reactions: Inspired by social media, reactions are a way for other users to express themselves without having to type.
  • GIFs. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. It might be worth even more when you have the right GIF. Arena Live Chat has access to a library of GIFs. 
  • Channels. A chat experience can become disorganized if there are many unrelated discussions happening in the same place. By creating separate channels, your audience can easily find people who share the same interests.

Live Chat Monetization With Arena: 3 Features To Generate Immediate Revenue

Arena Live Chat. Today, Arena Live Chat offers three different monetization capabilities: Donation, Gifts, and Tip Jar. There are a few different ways to use these options, so let’s take a closer look at how to use these features.

Donation

With a donation, a user directly gives money to you. Before accepting donations, it’s essential to set clear expectations with your audience. Some people, they associate the word donation with a charitable organization. If you are running a fundraising event for a nonprofit, using the donation monetization option makes sense. For-profit companies should generally avoid using the donation feature because it may confuse their audience.

Gift and Tip Jar

Both of these live chat monetization features are useful in a few circumstances. For example, an ecommerce business might invite an influencer to a product launch event. The primary focus of the virtual event is to promote the product being launched. That said, you may want to give your audience the chance to send a gift or tip to the influencer participating in the event. Also, the gift and tip car monetization features are relevant if you are hosting a concert. As with the donation option, requesting tips may not be appropriate for companies to use.

How Does Arena Process The Revenue? 

Let’s say you generate significant revenue from your live chat session. Your finance team will want to know if these funds will be tracked and managed. Arena makes this process easy through the payment integrations available through the Enterprise plan. Other Arena users can use PayPal to receive revenue. 

Don’t use PayPal? Don’t worry – Arena is also working on developing an integration with Stripe. Stay tuned for more news on that front!

After you receive funds, take some time to analyze the results. For example, are there any users who sent unusually large amounts? If so, it’s wise to reach out to thank them. This extra effort goes a long way to keep the most passionate members of your audience engaged.

Live Chat Monetization: Optimizing For Conversions

The most powerful way for a company to leverage live chat monetization is to view it as a marketing platform. Start by using live chat as a way to build awareness and trust with your audience. By hosting a series of live chat events over time, your audience will become more familiar with your brand. As a result, they will be more likely to positively respond to marketing messages such as an invitation to join your email list, buy a product or meet with your sales team.

Many Arena users use live chat experiences as a way to generate conversions. For example, you can use Arena conversion cards to focus your audience on a conversion goal. Conversion cards can be used for several objectives like getting a prospect to sign up for your list, following you on social media, visiting a landing page or making a purchase.

Today, there are a few popular you can leverage Arena conversion cards in Live Chat and Live Blog to grow your business.

  • Lead Generation: Capture emails, Ebook download, Visit a webpage (e.g. a landing page)
  • Sales: Sell a product, sell a subscription to streaming services

Of course, you’re not limited to these options. Want to invite people to sign up for a paid, exclusive live chat experience? You can do that! Want to grow your following on TikTok instead? You can use conversion cards to advance that goal. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaCyOtk3838

For the best results, it is smart to augment your conversion cards in the event itself. Let’s say you are running a virtual conference event with Arena Live Chat. Ask your presenters to verbally reinforce the call to action mentioned on the conversion card (e.g. “And now, please click the link in the live chat to get updates about our next virtual event!”). This approach is especially effective if your audience is new to use Arena Live Chat and conversion cards.

As you start to become more familiar with running live chat experiences, you’ll gradually collect more and more data on your customers. Use the Arena customer data platform to put your customer data to good use. Without a CDP in place, you’re missing out on a significant portion of your live chat monetization opportunity. 

Get More Revenue From Your Website With Live Chat Today

You’ve discovered all of the ways that a live chat app can help you monetize your website audience. A more engaged audience means more pageviews and time on site which directly impacts potential advertising revenue. That’s not all. When your audience engages with you and others in a live chat, they are more likely to like and trust your brand. When you add live chat to your website, you’ll start to find that lead generation and sales become much easier. Learn more about Live Chat here.

How To Boost Your Engagement With A Social Stream

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A social stream is a powerful way to leverage public posts to grow your audience and engagement. With a social media stream, you’ll regularly have new content to share and ease the burden on your editorial team to hit publish constantly.

How exactly does a social network stream or social media wall help you? Stay tuned because we’re going to cover that next.

What Is A Social Stream?

To explain the value of a social media stream, look at a breaking news example. Imagine your organization is covering a championship event or election. Every few seconds or minutes, new developments happen. It may be challenging for staff to cover these developments.

What if you could easily pull in a relevant Facebook post, a tweet, or other social content to enrich your coverage? Your staff would find it much easier to cover all of the angles of the event thanks to social content curated from a wide range of social media accounts. 

Who knows, you might even find some social media influencers to feature in upcoming marketing campaigns and virtual events!

Social Stream Coverage: How Does It Work In Practice?

Also known as a social media wall, this content technique highlights the amazing content created by your community. Including this community content in your website acts as social proof. Other people can see that your content and organization are attracting interest, and that makes it more appealing to participate in. When the rest of the visitors see that other people are excited about your brand, it makes your website and content more appealing.

Let’s say you are running a professional conference for your members like the Ontario Association of Veterinary Technicians (OAVT). The Association created a social feed on its website pulling in social media content using the hashtag #OAVT2022

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This approach encourages event participants to use the event hashtag when they post. A social stream is effective because it encourages your audience to share their insights and promote your event. Furthermore, this type of social media stream can also help you improve your event content further in the future. You’ll better understand the themes and topics that interest your audience.

How Does A Social Stream Work?

The easiest way to explain a social stream is to look at a simple example. Through your market research, you know that your audience loves to use Twitter. That’s good news because most Twitter content is public and easy to search.

Setting up your social stream involves searching for relevant social media posts to find user-generated content relevant to your purpose. Usually, the search process focuses on looking for keywords that use a few specific keywords, like a hashtag. All of these updates are then reposted on your social media stream. To avoid upsetting your audience, make sure that you use a platform with a content moderation feature. Without this feature, you might accidentally end up featuring profanity on your website! Such inappropriate content may distract your audience from converting at best or hurt your reputation at worst.

Take a sneak-peak on how Arena’s Social Stream feature works in the video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxgRBLN5cGU

Using a social stream is an excellent way to augment your live blog and provide coverage for a breaking news event. Your social wall gathers content from multiple social accounts on several social networks through keyword searches and other means. That means your team can focus on interacting with your audience and bringing your content strategy to life. 

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Four Social Stream Benefits For Publishers And Brands

There are several reasons why curating relevant content from a social media feed supports your organization’s goals. 

1) Give Your Website A Social Experience 

Most of the top websites online today include a social dimension. Without a social component, it will be more difficult for your website. The good news is that you don’t have to build a social media network to gain these benefits. Instead, you can add a social media element by setting up social content aggregation (i.e., a social media wall) on your website.

When your audience sees that their thoughts and opinions are featured on your website, they’re more likely to return. Potential customers are more likely to trust your brand when they see others positively discussing your content.

2) Automate Content Curation

Tracking down relevant content for content curation can be a painfully time-consuming process. Social streams play a powerful role by automatically identifying and sharing social media content. There’s no coding required – you just set up relevant hashtags and keywords and watch the content flow into your website.

Once the content curation process is set up, it just takes periodic monitoring to ensure you are curating content relevant to your goals.

3) Increase Website Traffic and Engagement 

Regularly posting new content to your website signals to people and search engines that your business is active in the digital world. Regularly posting high-quality digital content is table stakes to compete online.

However, there are limits to how much your content team can produce. That’s one way where adding a social stream to your website helps. By regularly posting new content every few seconds or minutes, your website is always sharing something new. That sends powerful signals to search engines that they should keep paying attention to your website. Ultimately, your SEO campaigns will benefit and yield more traffic as a result.

When your social stream features positive interactions relating to your brand, it is far easier to trust your brand. As a result, website visitors are more likely to agree to join your email list and hear more about your offers. 

4) Improved virtual event and hybrid event performance

Organizing a successful virtual event takes significant planning and effort. Getting more positive attendee reviews, leads and audience loyalty make it easier for your audience to interact with your brand. Including a social stream on your website helps event performance because your audience can easily find what other people are saying about the event. 

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Is A Social Stream The Right Move For You?

While a thriving social stream can yield amazing performance, some prerequisites exist to make it work. Without these building blocks in place, connecting to the Facebook feed or seeking to optimize your social stream settings are unlikely to yield results. Discuss these four questions to decide if you are ready to launch a social stream.

How many social media followers do you have?

Generating buzz on social media is tough when you have few followers. A general rule of thumb is that a social stream produces better results when you have at least one thousand followers. If your organization has few followers, refocus your strategy to grow your social following.

With very few followers, it will be difficult to stream with ease because there are simply not enough people interacting with your content.

What level of engagement do you have with your followers?

Review your social media feed and look over the last few weeks. How often do your followers meaningfully engage with your content? That is a good signal if you see a steady increase in comments, content sharing, and other interactions. If engagement is low, find out why. Your content may not be connecting with your followers. In that case, running a social stream may not produce many results.

What’s in it for your social followers to talk about you?

Regularly answering the question “what’s in it for me?” is one of the most critical questions in marketing. People in your audience have countless other opportunities to discover information and community online – why should they pay attention to you? There are various ways to solve this question, like offering exclusive virtual events or classic incentives like discount codes for attending your event.

Are you giving your followers a good reason to interact at a point in time?

Social media walls are often run for a short period ranging from a few hours to a few days. Therefore, giving your followers a compelling reason to interact with you intensively while you run the social media wall is crucial. 

Organizing virtual events are one of the best ways to spark high levels of engagement. Planning an exciting virtual event or hybrid event is easier when you start with proven ideas. For additional inspiration, check out our post 8 Online Event Ideas for News and Media Publishers.

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How To Choose The Best Social Stream Tool

Selecting the best social stream platform for your website is easier when you know the right features and capabilities to look for. 

Simple Set-Up Process

Adding a social stream to your website should not take hours or days. At a minimum, the tool you provide should provide step-by-step setup instructions. These step-by-step setup guides may take the form of videos, screenshots, and other formats.

Track Record of Performance Improvements

Social media features and platforms are constantly evolving. For example, Instagram is changing in 2022 to better compete against TikTok. The social stream tool you select should be regularly updated to add support for new platforms, API changes, and other changes.

In addition to keeping up with changes, ask about new fantastic features in the pipeline that may make the app even more valuable to you. 

Customer Support

What if your social stream freezes or malfunctions during a significant event? In that case, you need access to technical support resources like a specialized social stream support team. In addition, find out how the support team works (e.g., email only, phone support, hours of support) so that you can plan appropriately.

Key Social Stream Product Features

With those points covered, there are specific advanced features to look for in a social stream tool. Arena currently offers all of these capabilities so that you can save time and grow your audience faster.

  • Auto-posting: Enable automatic posting on your website and have your live blogs run automatically with user-generated content. This means you don’t have to approve each new update manually.
  • Real-time stream and results: Allow content to flow to your stream and track results from social media in real-time. 
  • Content personalization: You have the choice to repost social content “as is” or add your commentary, analysis, and perspective. Periodically commenting on curated content is a smart way to add value to your audience. 
  • Hashtag and Keyword Support: Track hashtags or keywords on social media and have a unified social stream about specific topics or events.
  • Integrations: Create social streams for networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and personalized RSS feed types.
  • Social Stream Templates: Create and save social stream templates that can be reused multiple times.
  • Publishing Calendar Support: Your social stream tool should fit your schedule needs. Want to schedule content ahead of time for the holidays or weekends? With Arena, you can add specific content to your library for later publishing. This is a smart way to save up content for holiday periods so that your editorial team can take a break.
  • Embed content to your website: Embed a social wall with stream results directly into your website, constantly feeding your fresh audience content. Embedding a social stream widget on your website gives your audience another reason to stay on your website, which means more chances for conversions.
  • Branded Design: Design your stream according to your brand’s style guide to give your audience a consistent experience. Alternatively, you can use the default settings.
  • Use Content Moderation: Some social media content is unsuitable for your brand’s values and goals. Using filters and widgets, you can filter out profanity and other unsuitable content based on your chosen criteria.

To lift engagement even further, use Arena Live Chat to encourage your audience to share their thoughts and questions directly on your website.

How To See A Social Stream In Action 

Watching how other organizations use social media walls and social streams is a great starting point. However, there’s nothing like seeing this technology come to life in your organization. 

Try Arena’s social stream solution by signing up for a free 14-day full feature trial.

Why Virtual Events Are Better With Live Chat: 9 Reasons

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Virtual events and hybrid events have boomed in popularity recently. More companies are using a chat platform for live events to make their events more interactive. Your event team can see and answer questions and encourage connections with a chat service. 

If you’re new to offering a chat experience in your virtual events, use our tips to grow audience engagement, increase your attendee count and offer a memorable attendee experience. 

Nine Reasons Why Companies Are Adding Live Chat To Virtual Events

Here are a few ways adding a chat tool can help your live events strategy. Live chat is influential in lifting sales, marketing, and growing your online audiences. Let’s start by looking at how virtual events powered by live chat grows top-line revenue.

How To Get More Sales With Virtual Events and Live Chat

The sales team can benefit from live chat in several ways. For the best results, invite a few people from sales to each chat experience you run. If they cannot attend live, offer to provide the chat transcript for their review after the event.

1) Get Warm Leads

A warm lead is someone who already knows, likes, and trusts your brand to some degree. From a sales perspective, converting warm leads into customers is usually easier and faster. 

Let’s say that you have 100 chat users in your virtual event chat. Following up with all event attendees is worthwhile, but the follow-up process should be tailored. Review questions and comments chat users post in the chat module. A person who asks about product pricing, shipping, or features is likely to be a high-quality warm lead. Such a lead merits immediate follow-up.

Use the attendee report as a resource for the rest of your chat participants. For example, you may have ten warm leads and 90 other chat users. The sales team will immediately respond to the warm leads. Engage the rest of your chat users using your marketing engagement platform. Check to see if your chat options include the functionality to export a transcript and attendee report so that you can quickly identify the right people to interact with.

2) Deepen Product Knowledge

The ability to answer product questions in a detailed and persuasive manner is crucial for sales. Paying attention to the questions and comments that business professionals and other attendees ask in your chat session has training value. Attending streaming events alongside customers is a powerful way to keep your sales team informed about the latest features and product developments.

After each virtual event, compile a list of the most common questions. Share these questions with the sales team. It may help better interact with prospects during sales calls and meetings.

3) Improve Sales Win Rates With Market Understanding

Understanding your customers’ needs, problems, and concerns is vital to sales success. When a salesperson attends a virtual event, they have a chance to see their customers in action. In particular, sales reps can deepen their understanding of the market by looking for the following:

Questions, especially those questions asked more than once, can help the salesperson improve their prospecting. Knowing the questions prospects tend to ask means you can develop better pitches. Customer feedback can also improve sales presentation slide decks and similar resources.

Reviewing chat messages for problems that people mention is helpful. For example, your prospects may not know that your company offers advanced analytics. If you see users complaining about working with data, paying attention to problems can help.

These benefits for the sales team are significant for newer salespeople who may not know your product and market deeply.

What A Chat Platform For Live Events Improves Marketing Results 

A chat platform can help you reach your key marketing metrics faster and more efficiently. As you become more familiar and skilled with running virtual events, these marketing benefits will compound over time.

4) Boost Engagement

What if your users attended a company conference and could not interact with anybody? That would be a painfully dull event, and those attendees would be less likely to register for future virtual events you offer.

Several factors matter in creating a compelling virtual event like offering a high quality of video, exciting content, and a sense of community connection. Adding live chat to your virtual events transforms your virtual event from a boring lecture to a community experience.

While attendee questions to your company are highly valuable, it is smart to encourage community connections as well. For example, you might organize breakout sessions where current customers can share their experiences with each other and prospects.

5) Increase Time Spent On Your Content

According to SEMrush, the average worldwide bounce rate for all websites is 30%. However, several industries have a bounce rate of over 40% including news & media, real estate, and groceries. When users leave your website quickly, it’s tough to build a connection.

Offering a virtual event with chat apps gives you the power to cut your bounce rate down. When a person signs up for a virtual event, they are usually planning to attend for an extended period of time. As a result, bounce rates fall. By maintaining low bounce rates and engagement, you have an excellent opportunity to grow organic search traffic.

Further, highly engaged prospects are more likely to give you useful feedback about your concern. That qualitative feedback is a useful supplement to your customer data platform. Over time, you will be better able to predict the types of content that reliably connect with customers.

By increasing time on site through virtual events and live chat, you have more opportunities to present calls to action for your users. That means more leads for your sales team to engage after the event.

6) Earn Google’s Trust (and Traffic) 

In digital marketing, the term “E-A-T” has recently gained popularity. The EAT acronym means “Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.” Becoming a trusted authority in your industry takes deliberate effort over time. It includes publishing useful articles, videos and other resources on your website.

In addition, you can earn credibility through virtual events and by offering a chat window. For example, you can harness the power of content curation. Imagine you are running a tax accounting firm. Earning the attention and trust of accounting clients is challenging. That’s where organizing live events with a chat service helps. 

Global accounting firm Deloitte offered a virtual conference in May 2022 with live presenters and engagement tools. While the Deloitte event was aimed at accounting professionals seeking continuing education, similar events on tax (e.g. tax planning strategies) could be offered to clients. The Deloitte virtual event included two partners serving in co-host roles. Having more than one event host is wise, especially when your virtual events span several days.

An accounting firm that offers tax planning virtual events from December to March can earn trust. The firm can invite speakers to discuss changes to tax laws and regulations that may help their clients save money or avoid audits. Furthermore, you can record the virtual event and then use the transcript to create additional expertise-boosting content assets.

Pursuing E-A-T with live events and live chat also matters for media companies and publishers. Your staff editors, experts, and contributors will draw in the core audience. But why stop there? Increase credibility further by adding more diverse voices to your coverage. For example, you could invite a few well-regarded social media influencers to serve as remote presenters and chat with participants. Those influencers will lend your event more credibility and further grow your audience.

7) Make Your Virtual Events More Compelling With A Social Event

Recent research from Harvard University found that 36% of all Americans experience loneliness. Your virtual events play a role in addressing the loneliness and isolation epidemic. Your virtual event will help people connect with others who share their interests and passions by offering live chat. 

To further encourage social connections and networking, offer a mix of experiences in your virtual event. It is especially important to provide breakout sessions and small group experiences. These smaller group gatherings make it easier for your audience to connect with each other. 

Growing Your Audience With Chat-Powered Virtual Events

Online publishers and media companies are increasingly turning to online events as a strategy to grow their audience. Adding live chat makes publisher virtual events more effective in several ways.

8) Increase Subscriber Retention

In publishing, it is traditional to put significant effort into acquiring paying subscribers. Retaining subscribers is a different story. Your subscribers have many different demands on their attention. One-quarter of American households pay for at least three streaming services today. 

Offering virtual events supported by live chat as a subscriber-only benefit is a powerful way to keep your subscribers engaged.

9) Develop Strategic Alliances With Virtual Events

Alliances with influencers, experts, and authors can all play a role in helping you to grow your audience. As you plan your event series, set a goal to include special guests interesting to your audience. 

The Wall St Journal has a conference series called WSJ Live that includes online events for different executive audiences like CIO Exchange and the CMO Network Member Breakout. You may not have the Wall St Journal’s resources, but this strategy can be adapted. For example, a lifestyle publication might offer virtual events with up-and-coming chefs to spotlight the most exciting restaurants.

What To Look For In Your Live Chat Tool

You’ve seen many ways a live chat app can lift marketing, sales, and audience growth results. Now, you might be wondering – which chat tool is right for you? Arena Live Chat is a great choice, of course. If you’re curious to compare and contrast Arena to other platforms, there are a few key features to keep in mind.

To successfully use live chat for live events, make sure your app includes the following:

When you offer virtual events to your event attendees, participating in live chat should be seamless. That’s why it is essential to have a chat widget appear on your website. There’s nothing for your attendees to install.

During event chat sessions, emotions may run high. Often, that’s a great sign of highly engaged attendees. However, there is also a risk of inappropriate content and chats. Providing detailed instructions to your event moderators is one way to reduce inappropriate behavior. In larger events, chat event moderation is easier when you have a chat tool that automatically filters profanity.

Think of your virtual event as a traditional conference. Some people will be happy to raise their hand and ask a question in public – like posting a question in a public chat. Other people prefer to raise questions and comments privately. Your audience chat experience should include both a public chat room and the capability to send private chat messages back and forth.

It’s crucial to select a live chat platform that works for you today and your future events. 

Today, you might run virtual events for a few dozen attendees. Attendance will increase as your audience grows and more people become interested in your online events. Check to see if your live chat tool can accommodate larger audiences.

Planning a successful virtual event takes time and effort. Your event technology should not add to the burden. Make sure you select a live chat tool that is simple and easy to install and configure. Likewise, your event team should be able to set up events in minutes without resorting to complicated instructions.

Want to see how Arena Live Chat performs? Contact us today to request a demo and you can see how our platform enhances virtual events.

Ready To Try Live Chat For Free?

Now that you know how Live Chat tools can enhance events, your next step is to try a Live Chat Tool. Arena’s group Live Chat tool is simple and allows you to create and embed a chat to your site in minutes. You can see how easy it is to set up in the video below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c2aNilRUqM

Increase Live Stream Engagement: 11 Tactics That Work

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Do you want more live stream engagement from your target audience? It’s getting more complex. The competition for viewer engagement is significant.

For example, in a 2020 study, the top three distractions for US employees working from home include social media, smartphones, and binge-watching content. These distractions make it difficult to maintain high levels of live stream engagement.

Whether you are focused on a product launch or other types of virtual events, video streaming technology can help. When you have the right content ideas, delivering engaging content gets much easier. Use these live streaming tips and examples below to create your rough plan to lift streaming engagement over time.

What Is A Live Stream?

A live stream is an online video broadcast where an individual or group of people appear on video to engage with their audience. As a rule of thumb, the live stream experience often includes screen sharing and individuals appearing on camera.

Typically, there are two ways that companies use a live stream to earn revenue. Some companies earn revenue by selling advertising space or sponsorships, especially in entertainment. Most live stream companies use it as part of their content strategy to attract prospects and fill their sales funnel.

Why Now Is The Time To Add Video Streaming To Your Marketing Strategy

Streaming sessions have fast become one of the best ways to attract prospects to your sales funnel. By 2027, the live stream market is projected to grow to $250 billion. The most successful early adopters of livestream video have been in the entertainment niche. Millions of people watch gamers play their favorite video games on Twitch, YouTube, and Facebook.

The stream experience is not limited to gamers, though. Live stream sessions are increasingly being used to sell products (i.e., live shopping), promote products, and supercharge influencer marketing campaigns.

The growth of Live Stream Video Sessions is Booming, as Shown in the Following Statistics:

Investing in live streaming now means you have the opportunity to win in the marketplace as an early adopter.

This finding reveals that live streaming video experiences can become a profit center! Take note of media and entertainment brands looking for ways to grow their subscriber base!

There’s a reason why so many YouTubers and other online content creators encourage their viewers to like and comment on their videos. These techniques are proven to grow their audience.

That doesn’t mean you have to improvise every moment of the session. By all means, script out your content ideas so that you have a rough plan to follow.

Live stream content must be part of your marketing strategy if your target audience includes younger consumers.

This pattern is especially common in industries like apparel, fashion, and beauty, where a video demonstration adds value. It can be difficult to imagine if a piece of clothing or makeup is right for you. Seeing a popular influencer try out these products can make a big difference in conversions.

To grow engagement in your online events, live streaming deserves a place in your strategy. The good news is that you probably already have plenty of content ideas if your company has already published successful social media posts, blog posts, and other forms of content.

Four Companies Winning With Live Streaming

If you’re excited about the potential of adding live stream engagement to your company, your might be wondering: who else is succeeding with live streaming? Several businesses have are successfully using the power of live video to sell products, generate leads and grow their audiences.

The following examples show different types of online events where live streaming played a role

Bloomingdale’s Uses Livestreaming To Sell Products

The major US retailer invited Sandra Choi, creative director at Jimmy Choo, to present a 45-minute live stream session in 2021. To encourage immediate sales, the retailer offered a free personalized product for buying. All told, the company has run dozens of live streaming events to engage customers.

Burberry Partners With Twitch For A Live Stream

Promoting a product for immediate purchase is just one way to use a live stream. Luxury fashion brand Burberry streamed a fashion show in 2020 in partnership with Twitch. This event builds on the brand’s commitment to online events – it ran its first online event in 2010.

SAP Connects With B2B Customers With LinkedIn Live

SAP, a multi-billion dollar technology company based in Germany, has successfully used live video to grow its audience. The tech business has run its online show – SAP BTP Better Together: Customer Conversations – for over a year. Season 1 of the live stream show featured interviews with customers like Ferrara, the Gates Corporation, Evernex and others.

Eaton Answers Customer Questions Live

Eaton, a multi-national power management company, is successfully using LinkedIn Live to create live content. The business has created an “Ask the Experts” video series on various topics like career growth and diversity and inclusion. Eaton’s success shows that you don’t need to have celebrities or influences to make your live stream events interesting. Your employees have amazing expertise that is just waiting to be unlocked!

Outside of fashion and retail, live streaming experiences take different forms. For example, many B2B companies use webinars and other online events to connect with their prospects.

There is one challenge associated with focusing more resources on live stream events. Unlike prerecorded videos and webinars, live stream events require more effort. At a minimum, it is helpful to have at least two people – the presenter and the support person – involved in every live stream. Putting in the effort to create an excellent streaming experience, you will find it easier to maintain audience engagement.

Live Stream Engagement: 11 Ways To Get More Viewers

Now you’ve seen how companies are achieving wins with live streaming, it’s time to build your live streaming session. These tips can be used to enhance an existing live stream program or help you launch your first live stream session successfully.

  1. Set Your Marketing Goal For The Livestream 

Planning and executing a successful live stream video experience will take time and resources. Before you commit to those resources, choose a key metric and goal to evaluate the success of your event. For example, you might track the number of orders for the promoted product or the number of leads generated.

  1. Start With What Works With Your Audience

Coming up with amazing content ideas is tough! To save time, review your analytics software to see which content has resonated with your audience in the past. A customer data platform makes it easier to attribute purchases and lead generation to specific content posts. If you don’t have a CDP in place, use other metrics like pageviews, shares, and engagement time to measure what’s working.

  1. Seek Out Product Demonstration Opportunities

As you plan your live stream experience, plan a few ways to show your product. For software, a demo with real data can work well. Even colleges and universities can use demonstrations – use a smartphone and show people around your campus. These product demonstrations can form the core of the live stream in a live shopping event. Or you can add a product demo to the end of a different event.

  1. Invite A Popular Influencer To Join You

There’s a reason why well-known authors and actors are often asked to give keynote talks at conferences – it helps to draw in the crowds. Apply the same principle to your streaming events by inviting an influencer to join you. When you strike the deal with the influencer, invite them to help you promote the event.

  1. Marketing The Live Stream Event Is Critical

Once you’ve chosen a live stream platform, it’s time to promote your event. You can do this by posting on your social media platforms, running paid ads, and sending email sequences to your list.

Give your audience to register for the event by clicking a link and entering email information. Once someone is registered, send them automatic email reminders to be more likely to attend.

By asking your audience to register, you get a clearer idea of how many viewers to expect. It also helps to include an event hashtag on social media. This can increase follower engagement and generate more excitement for your live stream.

  1. Select Your Live Stream Platform

There are two ways you can run a video streaming session: use an existing social platform or set up a branded platform that you control.

Social platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitch make it easy to start a live broadcast. If your brand already has a significant presence on one of those platforms, it makes sense to stream there. However, there is a downside to relying on a third party. Your audience may become easily distracted by notifications, messages, and other interactions.

To minimize interruptions and distractions, set up your own platform using a tool like Restream lets you broadcast on more than 30 social media platforms simultaneously.

A professional platform also comes with features that help you monetize your live stream, increase audience engagement, and run post-broadcast analytics. If you don’t go with Restream, consider other industry-leading platforms like Vimeo, Dacast or Brightcove.

Vimeo OTT offers a seamless integration with Arena Live Chat. This way you can provide your audience with better engagement experiences during your live events.

  1. Commit To A Livestreaming Schedule 

Your live stream performance may have limited results when you first get started. That’s why a one-off approach to running a live stream is less likely to succeed. Instead, successful streaming strategies tend to commit to an ongoing schedule of streaming. Running a multi-year streaming show like Twitch’s Critical Role is one approach. Alternatively, consider setting up a three or part-event series tied to a specific theme like the holiday shopping season.

  1. Use Incentives, Urgency And Deadlines To Lift Engagement

Urgency is a time-tested principle in sales and marketing. It also applies to growing your live stream engagement. Remember Bloomingdale’s live streaming example from above? The company offered incentives to encourage people to show up at the event and place an order during the event. There are multiple ways to implement this strategy: discounts, limited edition products or offering early access.

  1. Get Inspiration From Other Live Streams

When you focus too much on your live stream engagement metrics, staying creative and fresh gets more difficult. Certainly, measurement matters (we’ll cover it in the next tip). However, engagement also requires ideas and inspiration!

That’s why we’re giving you the performance to spend an afternoon hanging out on live streaming platforms. Ideally, look for streaming shows and episodes that are appealing to a similar audience. If you don’t find any streams like that, look at how entertainment-oriented streamers keep their viewer count high throughout their videos. For example, look at how often live stream content creators interact with their audience via the live chat during their stream. In addition, look at how streamers presented sponsored content and messages to their audience.

Making time to study those who have mastered the art of live stream engagement is one of the best ways to shorten your learning curve.

  1. Level Up Your Audio and Video Equipment

Upgrading the quality of your gear is a smart way to make your live stream come through loud and clear. Tools like the Shure MV88+ Video Kit connect directly to your smartphone for enhanced audio and video quality. It comes with a microphone, tripod, and headphones. You can also stand out with a multi-camera setup by purchasing software like OBS Studio, Wirecast, or VidBlasterX.

  1. Measure And Optimize Your Live Stream

The final way to improve your engagement and conversion numbers over time is to measure each streaming event. Start with the easy to measure metrics like viewer count, activity levels in your live chat and traffic on your website. If your live stream event includes coupons or other trackable calls to action, measure those factors as well. With each live stream you run, taking 15-30 minutes to analyze what worked and what didn’t will gradually lift your engagement numbers over time.

The One App That Lifts Live Stream Engagement Every Time

Your live stream events should be a two-way street. You present and your audience raises questions and gives you feedback. That’s why adding Live Chat to your website is so important. Arena Live Chat only takes a few minutes to install and set up.

Set Up Your WordPress Live Blog Plugin In 7 Steps

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Adding a WordPress live blog plugin to your website is one of the best ways to lift audience engagement and conversions. This step-by-step guide will discover precisely how to install the Arena Live Blog WordPress plugin. You’ll also discover why using a live blogging platform benefits your business.

Use the table of contents below to jump straight to the WordPress live blog plugin setup steps if you’re ready for that. Not sure if a live blog makes sense for your organization? Jump ahead to section 2 of this definitive guide. 

How To Install Live Blog Plugin To Your WordPress Website

The Arena Live Blog WordPress plugin is simple and easy to install.

With Arena’s plugin, you can create Live Blog sessions for live events, event coverage for news, and more. That’s not all – it can also be used for sports coverage, covering court proceedings, and engaging conference attendees. 

With our blogging plugin, your Live Blog can be fully automated or moderated by an editor or community manager. Besides, you can mix content generated by your content team with user-generated content from social media. 

Arena’s Live Blog platform and plugin provide critical features such as:

  • Real-time Live Blogging functionality
  • Social Media monitoring 
  • Social Media integration (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram)
  • Posting user-generated content curated from social media 
  • Automatic or moderated sports play-by-play
  • Configuration options to make the plugin fully brandable 
  • Sports calendar integration 
  • Real-time audience analytics
  • Cross-posting to social media
  • Optimization for mobile 
  • Unlimited editors to manage your live events
  • Live Chat integration to encourage ongoing discussion about your event

7 Steps to Live Blogging with WordPress

Getting started with live blogging is fundamentally similar to posting a regular post in WordPress.  

It takes just a few steps to get started with a Live Blog on WordPress and offer your audience updated content in real-time. With Arena’s Live Blog, you can quickly start a live blog, including the ability to embed photos, videos, and other media types in your posts. 

Step 1: Install The Arena Plugin On Your WordPress Website

To get started, simply access the “Plugin” section within WordPress and click “Add New.” Then, all you have to do is search for Arena.im in the list of featured plugins and click “Install Now.”

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Step 2: Setting up your account 

The next step is to set up your company’s account with the Arena plugin. To do that, go to the “Settings” section and click “Arena.” That’s where you will find accounts, organizations, and site preferences. You must select the account you will use to live Blog, choose your site, and click. 

The plugin will then grant you access to Arena’s tool so it can automate Live Blog posts. Depending on your WordPress configurations, you may need to activate the Live Blog function in your posts. 

 Tip: Don’t have an Arena account? You can start using Arena for free.

 

 

Step 3: Create Your First Live Blog Post 

Creating your first Live Blog post is simple.

  • Open the Arena plugin in WordPress
  • Click “Create New Event” 
  • Set up your preferences for the new event
    – Title and Description (keep SEO requirements in mind here because an optimized Title and Description can help you to rank better on Google)
    – Choose an Event Category: For example, News, Film and TV, Shows, or Finance.
    – Choose Real-Time Options: To maximize real-time blog updates, ensure you enable real-time updates.

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Step 4: Add A Social Stream To Your Live Blog

Want to add social media content to your Live Blog? Use this step!

From the Arena plugin dashboard in WordPress, you can click “Add Stream” to search for accounts and keywords from social media and add content to your Live Blog curation. For instance, you could choose to display tweets or videos from a news channel or influencer account. All you have to do is insert the link to the channel or account.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxgRBLN5cGU

You can also set up the event status (live, upcoming, or done), add elements like tags, and enable comments or a chat room in the Live Blog post.

Remember that it is best to ask permission before repurposing social media content in your event, especially with influencers.

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Step 5: Customize the Live Blog Appearance And Advanced Options 

Use the Arena Live Blog customization features to provide a seamless experience for your audience. When the look and feel of the Live Blog match your brand, users are more likely to engage because the Live Blog will be consistent with the rest of your website.

Arena Live Blog on WordPress offers the following customization options:

  • Color
  • Position in the blog post (we recommend placing the Live Blog close to the top of your WordPress blog to maximize engagement)
  • Language
  • Enable sound alerts so that users get an audio notification when a new update is made
  • Add polls (polls allow you to pose questions and get feedback quickly. It’s one of the best and easiest ways to engage your audience).

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Step 6: Publish Your Live Blog

Now it’s time to publish your Live Blog in your post. 

To integrate your WordPress editor to the settings you did with the Arena plugin, click “Add Interactive content by Arena” in the editor interface.

You can click to add a new Live Blog or select an existing one. All you have to do next is click “add” to the Live Blogs you want to publish and simply click “Publish” on the WordPress page. 

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Step 7: Share The Link To Your Live Blog With Your Team

Get the link to your Live Blog, follow these steps:

  • Go to the Arena dashboard
  • Find the HTML code for the LiveBlog
  • Copy the HTML code to the Live Blog 
  • Paste it into the HTML box in the WordPress editor. 

This link will be seen only by you and other team members with access to your company’s WordPress credentials. The link will open in a new window on the editor page where you can write and publish updates.

You’re practically done! You can click “preview” to visualize how it will look and “update” to apply changes.

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Video: See The Entire Process Of Creating a Live Blog In WordPress

In the video below, you can better understand the entire process of creating a Live Blog.

 

 

Now that you know how to set up a WordPress live blog plugin for your website, you must set up your Arena account. Create your own Arena Live Blog – it’s free to try! And check out this list of more WordPress plugins for live events.

3 Reasons You Need A Live Blogging Platform To Win

Real-time coverage was a luxury offered by the world’s largest media brands. That’s changing today for a few reasons.

1) People Expect Real-Time Coverage

Twitter and other social media platforms have conditioned millions of consumers to expect fast responses. News organizations offering breaking news style coverage of important events like elections, sports, and beyond find it easier to win attention online.

2) Growing Competition For Audience Attention

More and more consumers expect real-time coverage of news and fast responses to questions. Your audiences expect speed because they are used to one-click ordering and finding exciting content in seconds.

Attracting and engaging your audience may become very difficult without a blogging platform that makes it easy to create and share relevant content. 

3) Increased Customer Service Expectations

Brands and publishers are expected to post updates to keep their audiences engaged. Publishers and media brands focused on current events, and coverage of sports events need new ways to connect with audiences. 

What is a Live Blog?

A live blog, also known as “live updates,” is a content platform that makes it easy to create and publish content. Journalists were among the first to use live blogs to cover breaking news stories in politics like elections. Today, the benefits of live blogging go far beyond the news media.

A live blog is unique because it’s designed for rapid updates as events unfold. As you find out more details, your team can update a live-blogged blog entry regularly. As a result, your reader will keep coming back over and over again because your website offers new and exciting information. 

While written blog posts are the most common format in live blogging, they are not the only option.

Live blog posts can also include:

  • Photos
  • Videos
  • Social media posts

With a Live Blog installed on your website, you can create a curated experience for your audience as breaking news, current events, and other developments unfold. 

Who Uses Live Blogs?

Initially, media organizations and journalists used live blogging the most. If you have ever seen “live updates” on a news website like CNN or FOX, you’ve seen live blogging in action. It’s especially common for current affairs situations with intense interest, like conferences, elections, and sports.

How Live Blogging Enhances Your Content Strategy

Adding Live Blogging to your toolkit is a powerful way to reach your publishing and marketing goals. Many organizations use Live Goal to reach new readers, increase audience engagement, or automate content production workflow. Live blogs optimize editorial work while offering the final audience a seamless content consumption experience. 

Grow your audience  

A study conducted by the University of London found that readers increasingly prefer live blogs to static content, discovering that live blogs can get up to 300% more views and 233% more visitors than conventional online articles on the same subject.

Just imagine if your website doubled its views and visitors. You’d grow revenue, conversions, and leads immediately.

Increase audience engagement time on your channels

Building a relationship with your audience takes time. If visitors leave after a few seconds, connecting with them is tough. A live blog can be transformational because this technology encourages readers to interact more with your content. 

Also, a live blog empowers your team to keep users on your web page, rather than leaving your website to share their views on social media. Your organic traffic will likely grow when search engines see users spending more time actively engaged on your website.

Diversify your content beyond traditional formats

When Content Walls and Content Hubs have become trendy, Live Blogs help brands stay competitive by diversifying the myriad of content they display on their official channels. Liveblogging is a great way to enrich static content and incorporate short-form content pieces – increasingly valued by audiences – into traditional formats.

Bringing new revenue opportunities

Live Blogs can foster new revenue streams for your company once they boost engagement and content syndication from a monetization standpoint. 

How? A live blog gives your audience a reason to stay on your website longer and keep hitting refresh. More time on your website means more pageviews and opportunities to generate revenue through advertising or selling your products and services.

Becoming an authority in your market

From a branding perspective, Live Blogs allow companies to position themselves as authorities in content curation, which is valuable for brands that deal with massive audiences and those that target niche audiences.

Liveblogging in your content strategy makes your brand more credible and relevant to your audience.

Learning about your audience

Integrating live blog tools into your analytics enables you to get better data for social listening. Live Blog represents a new way to observe your customers’ navigation behavior and how they respond to your content. Ultimately, you can get valuable insights that will lead to a better understanding of your target audience and needs.

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Try Arena Live Blog Today

Want to give Arena’s Live Blog tool a try? You can access our trial version in this link or install our plugin directly on WordPress. Publishers use our tool across 120 countries, including Fox Sports, Microsoft, and Turner.

5 Tips When Setting Up Arena Live Chat For Virtual Learning

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Virtual learning is much more than just educating via the web. Powered by the best technology, it can enhance the learning experience with the right tools. 

More: virtual learning is a whole new way of thinking and teaching, which has a lot of benefits. 

There are also some challenges to be solved, like student engagement.

That’s when a Live Chat tool, like Arena’s, can make a real difference. 

Connecting instructors and students on a friendly platform, Arena Live Chat can be a powerful ally to those who want better results from virtual learning. 

See below for tips & tricks for setting up Arena Live Chat before your class starts.

Planning Digital Education: Create Live Chats In Advance

 Digital education has possibilities that only digital can offer. Arena Live Chat allows you to create chat rooms in advance, thus, saving precious time in the future.

This is especially useful when you are planning an entire course with multiple classes and modules.

And, with Arena Live Chat, this is very easy to do. Just follow the steps below!

  1. Login into your account
  2. Inside the Dashboard, click on Live Chat
  3. Start creating chat rooms

The chat rooms will be automatically saved, and available for use whenever you want. 

For more detailed “how to” steps, check out our article on “How To Setup Arena Live Chat in Advance: tips, tricks & best practices.”

Preparing a High-Class Virtual Classroom with Content Manager

Virtual learning is very dynamic. Every minute is important, and no time can be wasted in a virtual classroom looking for content to illustrate a subject.

The risk is high: you can lose student engagement.

So, to help you get your classes 100% ready, Arena Live Chat has a Content Manager.

There, you can upload all the assets (images and videos) that you’ll use to enrich class lessons.

You can also create specific folders for specific classes to organize your material better.

It’s very simple to use – just a few clicks and voilá! 

  1. Inside the Dashboard, click on Content Manager at the Menu tab on the left
  2. Click on New
  3. Click on New Folder
  4. Start to drag & drop files

Use Polls to Get Real-Time Insights

Arena Live Chat has a polling tool, which can be used to get real-time insights from your students. 

They’re a great way to measure if your content is being assimilated by the students, for example. 

And, you can also prepare polls ahead of time, instead of creating them during the class, thereby, keeping the class involved. 

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In the dashboard, click on Live Chat, then on Polls, then fill out the fields, and click on Save Draft.

  1. Inside the dashboard, click on Live Chat
  2. Click on Polls
  3. Fill out the fields
  4. Click on Save Draft

For more detailed “how to” steps, check out our article on “How To Setup Arena Polls in Advance: tips, tricks & best practices.”

Get Closer To Your Team On Distance Learning 

Education is a team work. And, even working remotely, great teams equal great work when acting together as one unit on distance learning. 

That’s why Arena Live Chat can be controlled at the same time by more than one person, each with various roles and different access to functionalities. 

Roles like an instructor and a moderator, for example, which is very common in virtual learning.

Just follow the steps below.

  1. Inside the dashboard, click on Profile
  2. Click on Invite People
  3. Fill out the forms with the email addresses of your staff

Enriching Learning Experience with Conversion Cards

Conversion Cards are one of the most powerful features of Arena Live Chat to help improve virtual learning experience immediately. 

With them, you can easily share resources during a virtual class, like an Ebook, an exercise, etc. 

So, having the cards on hand is essential for fast deployment, and you can easily create them before the class begins.

One, two, three steps 🙂

  1. Inside the dashboard, click on Live Chat
  2. Click on Conversion Cards
  3. Create how many you think are necessary 

Conclusion: enhancing virtual learning with Arena Live Chat

Arena Live Chat can really take a virtual classroom to the next level. Using it, you can:

  1. Plan an entire course and create live chats for each class in advance
  2. Upload images and videos that you’ll use before the class starts
  3. Get real-time insights about your students with polls
  4. Work together with your team
  5. Easily share resources with Conversion Cards

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1XtqYhRxDM

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As a reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual learning became commonplace for millions of people around the world in the last few  years. There’s a lot of room for improvement yet, but some things are established already. Having a good tool to connect instructors and students (like Arena Live Chat) is a must-have, and, as in real life, good planning is essential if you want to achieve great results. 

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How To Improve The Blended Learning Experience

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A blended learning experience mixes IRL and digital education. And, with good technology tools, like Live Chat and Live Blog, a virtual learning environment can do much more. 

This new way of delivering education was meant to solve problems like affordability, increased flexibility, health and safety measures, and more. The reality is quite different and some educators are struggling to make blended learning effective.

To understand what’s working and what needs to be improved, it’s essential to return to cover the basics. The first step is understanding the blending learning concept, where it came from, and how it works. Once we understand the current form of blended learning, we can look at solving the top barriers and where technology can play a role.

What Is The Blended Learning Model?

Blended learning, also known as hybrid learning, combines digital instruction with in-person learning. For example, students might start their learning path by completing online courses which deliver learning at scale. Afterward, students can seek out personalized learning with a teacher or tutor. 

The precise mix of online learning methods and in-person learning will vary. If the nature of face to face instruction learning is highly applied, then meeting in a physical space regularly adds value. In other cases, an online space with recorded lessons may be a great choice. 

It’s also important to highlight that a type of blended learning model may involve more than one digital platform. Teachers and students might gather together in an online community during the school day. This community experience can help to develop collaboration skills.

Blended Learning Example: Classroom Plus Khan Academy

Now, what if a teacher recommends additional practice in specific skills? One-on-one face time with a tutor or teacher is one approach to take. There are other choices as well. For example, the Khan Academy has developed a robust digital platform with an extensive library of recorded lessons. 

A motivated student could study the Khan Academy math curriculum over the summer and receive instantaneous feedback on their performance. Best of all, the Khan Academy approach to training involves short lecture videos and quizzes. A student can rewatch and practice the material as often as they like.

Alternatively, schools and teachers may decide to create a complete blended learning model. For instance, a teacher may be interested in teaching creative thinking skills. Teaching these skills requires effective feedback and personalized education.  A digital classroom with a virtual whiteboard might work well at the post-secondary level of education. However, younger students might struggle to make self-directed blended learning work.

In summary, blended learning usually includes a mixture of virtual and traditional learning courses. This may involve video conference technology, lecture recording technologies, online quizzes, a lab rotation, and other learning experiences to get students engaged. 

The 4 Key Blended Learning Challenges

Educational research by Ruth Boelens, Bram De Wever, and Michiel Voet has highlighted four significant challenges to adopting a blended learning method. 

1) How to incorporate flexibility

Delivering flexible learning in the traditional classroom is quite tricky. A significant amount of class time can be spent simply getting organized. Blended learning has the potential to enhance student learning by using digital technology to meet different learning preferences. In addition, a blended learning strategy means students can have more control over time. That’s vital because students and teachers may have peak energy at different times.  

2) Supporting interaction 

A blended learning program must consider the social impact of learning. For some students, a formal education program will fail. The opportunity to enjoy classroom discussion is not a frill: it is indispensable in online education. Unfortunately, some learning management systems emphasize online lessons and homework assignments at the expense of interaction.

3) Facilitating the students’ learning process

Students have different learning styles. Some like the flexibility of online learning, which includes the option to pause, rewind and go over the material multiple times. Other students need individual tutoring to make progress. Still, other students thrive with project-based learning. When designing online learning experiences, it is crucial to avoid one size fits all thinking. Instead, providing a variety of learning resources is vital.

4) Encouraging a suitable climate for learning

A blended learning approach also needs to consider the emotional state of students. If students are anxious or afraid, they will struggle to focus on the academic program. Students and teachers need to collaborate to foster a safe space for learning. That includes providing differentiated instruction when needed. In addition, it is also essential to be realistic about what educational technology can and cannot achieve. Teachers still need to use their judgment to reach out to students to offer support and listen to student concerns.

Equipping Your Virtual Classroom With The Right Technology

The right technology makes a big difference in providing responsive instruction, project-based blended learning, and other learning goals. On a daily basis, look for ways to use the following technologies. No single technology will serve as the backbone of student learning — instead, all of these tools.

Real-Time Engagement

Social interaction is a key component of what makes education engaging. Adding real-time engagement tools like Arena Live Chat and Live Blog have a key role to play. For more insight on how to use these engagement tools in education, see the tips in the next section of this post.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWLfagfeS8o

Online Technology For Discussions

Many e-learning platforms include discussion features including instructor-led sessions. In a hybrid education program, including a discussion forum is smart. For example, students can post questions about homework assignments and projects and the teacher can answer them. Reading these question-and-answer discussions helps everybody in the course to learn.

Video Conference Platform

Your method of teaching should include a video conferencing tool. It is especially important for language skills and other education with a social element. That said, learning sessions should not exclusively rely on video. Some students may not feel comfortable using video conferencing for long periods of time. 

Support For Self-Paced Learning

A common challenge in education is the varying levels of interest and motivation for students. Some students are passionate about certain education courses and want to move them quickly. Other students need more instructor time to learn the material. Your educational technology should support these individualized learning needs.

Integration With Offline Lessons

When your students come into the classroom environment, there should be a seamless connection to their virtual learning activities. Expertise in technology helps to achieve this result. It will likely take some experimentation over time to determine the best ways to balance offline and online learning experiences for your students. 

Six Ways To Support Students With Live Chat and Live Blog

A growing number of educators are discovering the power of using real-time engagement tools to support their students. Arena’s education solutions are here to help you increase graduation rates and support your students.

Tips To Use Live Chat In Blended Learning

In a few minutes, you can install Arena Live Chat on your website. Use these tips to engage your students more deeply.

1. Set Ground Rules For Chat

Depending on their age and experience, your students may have experienced using other chat services in the past. To foster a safe place, it’s important to set clear rules for your classroom’s chat experience. Start by referring to your school’s values such as respect and curiosity. 

2. Ask For An Assistant

When you have a large number of students using live chat, it can be difficult to keep track of the discussion. Invite one of your students or a teaching assistant to act as an assistant for the duration of the chat session. With Arena Live Chat, it’s really easy to make your staff help you during the class, with different roles and permissions.

3. Follow Up On Questions After Class

Unlike a traditional physical classroom, you can download a transcript from your live chat session. Exporting chat logs and reports to a CSV file will give teachers and instructors the ability to look at trends and/or revisit specific points. 

A valuable tip: spend a few minutes reviewing the transcript after class to look for any questions you didn’t have time to address. In your next class, whether it is online instruction or in the physical classroom, start off by addressing these questions.

Tips To Use Live Blog In Blended Learning

A live blog is a bit different from other communication technologies. Your students may not be familiar with this technology. You may need to offer a training program to faculty and students to help them learn their way around how and why to use the live blog. To get you started, use the following live blog tips.

4. Look For School Events To Celebrate

Many schools have events throughout the year including athletic competitions, awards ceremonies, and more. Running a live blog during a school event is a great way to mark the event. Also, an event live blog makes it easier for students and families to hear about the event if they are unable to attend in person.

5. Support Your Student Journalists

Does your school have a newspaper or other outlet? If so, adding a live blog to your media outlet is smart. Many journalists and news organizations use live blogs to cover events like wars, elections, conferences, and more. Give your students experience in how to use a live blog to cover an event.

6. Enhance Conferences

High school and college students may travel to events like math and science competitions, Model United Nations, and more. A live blog is an exciting way to add authenticity and depth to these events. For example, you could have a team of three live blog writers and have them interview conference participants. 

How To Bring Live Chat And Live Blog Technology To Your School

Getting started with Live Blog and Live Chat technology is easy. Find out more about Arena’s education solutions. 

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Benefits & Creating Your Program

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Offering distance online education, especially degree programs, is becoming more popular. To help you design distance education courses, use this guide to discover the value of digital online education and build your program.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown the world that traditional education needs to change. Online universities, distance courses, and other online programs have proven themselves. Find out how to use educational technology and online instruction delivery methods to improve access to education.

What is Distance Learning?

Distance education is best understood in contrast to traditional classes. Since the 19th century, school teachers have stood before their students to lecture. Access to education improved, and literacy rates increased in many countries.

Distance education is the learning approach for the 21st century. This new model emphasizes online learning tools and digital resources to engage students. It combines both synchronous learning options (e.g., live chat and video conferencing) and asynchronous learning (e.g., digital textbooks, assignments, and videos).

Distance Learning Benefits: Why Offer Remote Learning?

Why are colleges, universities and other educational institutions investing more resources in distance online learning? There are a number of reasons.

Distance Learning Adds Flexibility

Distance learning is especially popular with adult learners who need a high level of flexibility. For example, an older student may want to earn a college degree by studying evenings and weekends. Educational institutions that offer an online learning experience can help these students achieve academic success..

It’s not just adults that want flexible remote instruction. Community colleges and a growing number of universities are offer online classes to reach more students. Distance education students are already finding a few universities that emphasize online approaches to instruction.

Athabasca University illustrates what is possible in remote learning. Established in 1970, the institution offers a a wide variety of distance learning degrees including A, B and C. The university has 38,000 undergraduate and 3600 graduate degree students. Over 80% of the university’s undergraduate students work while they study.

Distance Learning Courses Are More Affordable 

Affordability is a top concern for many students and educators today. Innovation in education like emphasizing alternative approaches to delivering education is a critical way to solve this challenge. By delivering academic programs via distance learning programs, there is less need to develop and maintain a large campus presence.

For example, consider the business program at Boston University. The online MBA program currently has a total fee of $12,000. In comparison, the traditional MBA degree at the same educational institution charges $61,000 in tuition. 

Hybrid Distance Education Appeals To Different Learning Styles

Hybrid distance education programs – a combination of in person and online options – is another benefit of adding online education to your institution. With a digital option, you can increase access to instruction. This option is especially important for faculty and students in high cost of living areas like the University of London.

Further, hybrid learning experiences can better use online tools like Arena Live Chat. Offering these kinds of real time apps makes the learning process more flexible. For example, some students may feel shy about raising their hand in hand. Some students may feel more articulate and comfortable writing out their questions in a chat bot. 

What Are The Different Types of Distance Learning?

Now that you know why distance learning is beneficial, what are your options to add it to your educational programs? There are three broad strategies to leverage distance education technologies.

Online School / Online College (i.e. 100% Digital)

The first path is to embrace a fully digital experience. In essence, this approach is the digital update to correspondence courses of the past. This type of education works in many disciplines like the humanities, arts and some social sciences. However, it is less suitable to areas like medicine and science. For example, it would quite challenging for Harvard Medical School to offer 100% remote education experiences to aspiring physicians.

Making the move to a fully digital college courses will likely require offering faculty development programs. Otherwise, student success may suffer. 

Hybrid Education

Hybrid education is the process of aiming to combine online courses with traditional in person courses. There are various ways to bring this combined approach to life. For example, you might offer two sections of the same course: one remote and another for on campus students. 

Alternatively, you might choose to offer virtual office hours. 

Striking a balance between in person class time, reasonable class size and using a variety of digital tools can be difficult. Regular surveys of faculty and students can help to ensure that education experiences are handled effectively.

Ad Hoc Access To Instruction

Some institutions aren’t ready to a remote education to their core educational experience. Another option is to take a bare-bones approach: use distance online education in a limited way. For example, your college writing center or math support might provide virtual drop in hours where students can get access to learner support.

In addition, you can use virtual learning tools as a way to provide access to external resources like videos or discussion boards. This ad hoc, limited approach also means minimal demands on campus support staff.

Steps to Creating Your Distance Online Education Program 

Even as the COVD-19 threat fades away, offering various forms of distance learning is worthwhile. Increased affordability and flexibility are some of the key benefits of distance learning.

Step 1: Assess Your Institution’s Goals and Challenges

Like decisions around class size and evaluations of instruction, adding distance learning to your school takes careful thought. 

Faculty Capabilities

Explore the faculty time investments required to convert in person courses to a virtual format. Don’t assume faculty digital fluency levels are all at the same level. Faculty support teams, especially when leveraging new technology, can play a critical role. 

Supports For Students

In addition, examine your current ecosystem of learner supports like tutors, librarians and other services to evaluate if they are ready for a digital world.

Student Body Profile

Finally, look at your institution’s history. There’s a big difference between a college that has had generation of distance education experience like Athabasca University and a college new to this challenge. Check whether your students include a significant number of parents or working professionals who may need different help from campus support teams.

Step 2: Select Your Distance Education Platform

Selecting the right mix of educational technology often ranks as one of the top challenges for institutions. The specific mix of tools you select will depend on the educational delivery modes you have adopted.

In general, there are a few types of tools required to provide an effecting educational experience to students.

  • Learning management systems (LMS). This is the online tool where faculty can boost additional resources, respond to discussion questions and accept homework.
  • Video conferencing tool. Video calls are a crucial tool in many types of courses, especially courses that emphasize discussions and debates.
  • Real time engagement tools. Adopting tools like Arena Live Chat or Live Blog go a long way toward making students feel more engaged in the learning process.

You will find a good example in Pecege Institute. It leverages Live Chat to keep students and educators engaged for its own online courses and white label products to its business clients.

Step 3: Create Your Distance Education Plan

The next step is to engage your faculty members, students and other stakeholders to discuss what kinds of courses to offer in a remote format. Use the following prompts to identify courses and programs suitable for online learning:

  • What courses and programs are unsuitable for online learning (e.g. medicine and science courses requiring lab work)?
  • What types of courses have been successfully offered online in other colleges?
  • What courses are students and faculty most interested in offering in a virtual format (e.g. the business school might already have part time commuter students who would love an online option)?

Step 4: Set Up Your Learning Support Team

Once you have a clear picture of which courses will be offered in an online format, set up your support staff. At a minimum, it is best to have a team of educational technology specialists on call to provide support. Ideally, the support team will also contribute suggestions to help faculty find success.

Step 5: Launch Your Online Education Course

With the preparations in place, invite your faculty members to start building their course in your institution’s learning management system. When you first launch remote learning, it’s normal to experience some glitches. It’s all part of the remote learning experience!

Step 6: Assess The Remote Learning Experience For 

As an educational institution, it’s vital to learn from your own experience. To that end, set up surveys with each course to find out what worked and what could be improved. For example, you might find that some students wanted more opportunities to ask questions and fewer long course videos.

Keep Teacher-Student Interaction At The Heart Of Education

As we conclude, it’s worth remembering that college and university is fundamentally a social experience. Students sign up for courses because they want the chance to make friends, learn from respected teachers and join an interesting community. To that end, your suite of educational technology needs to support interaction. Find out how Arena’s educational solutions enrich your courses and programs with deeper student engagement. 

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