Tag Archives: social media posts

Why publishers have nothing to fear in a recession

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

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

Four Ways Bold Publishers Can Win In The Downturn

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

1. Offer Exclusive Access To VIPs In Online Events

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

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

Public Event With VIPs

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

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

Subscriber-Only Digital Events And Benefits

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

The Economist Subscriber-only digital events

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

The New Yorker Festival

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

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

2. Curate The Gold In Social Media Content

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

Enrich Your Coverage With Social Updates

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

Fact Check Social Media Posts

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

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

Invite Social Media Influencers

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

Create the Best of Social Media Lists

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

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

3. Enrich The Streaming Experience

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

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

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

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

Organize Viewing Parties

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

Invite Fans Behind The Scenes With the Cast and Crew

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

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

4. Leverage The Authenticity of User-Generated Content

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

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

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

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

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

How To Use User Generated Content In Virtual Events

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

What Is User Generated Content?

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

Should You Use User Generated Content?

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

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

Three Principles For Using User Generated Content In Your Live Event

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

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Quality Curation

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

Add Commentary

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

The Spice Principle 

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

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

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

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

Pre-Event Strategies Leveraging User-generated content 

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

1) Audience Questions

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

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

2) Competitor Content

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

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

3) Finding Trends

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

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

User Generated Content In Your Event 

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

4) Feature Posts Using An Event Hashtag

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

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

5) Highlight Influencer Posts

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

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

6) Lighten The Mood With Humorous Posts

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

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

7) Discuss UGC In Your Live Blog

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

Invite Guest Contributors

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

Respond To Social Media Posts

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

Get The Right Technology To Leverage UGC In Live Events

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

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.

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.

Next level of Real-time coverage at the NBA

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The NBA finals are one of the most anticipated sports events in the world. This year, apart from the coronavirus pandemic and record-low TV ratings, over 7 million viewers tuned in, just in the US, to watch the games. 

With millions of die-hard fans and worldwide visibility, it’s natural that some businesses turn the event into a giant marketing funnel.

In fact, the NBA itself has proven to be one of the most profitable sports businesses ever, with estimated annual revenue topping 8 billion dollars.

NBA real-time coverage

In times of quarantine, the interest in real-time content is even higher amongst internet users. 

Customers are always on. Given the newness of technology and innovation, they have all the tools to remain connected nonstop and wish to consume reliable information that leads them to make better decisions. The faster, the better. 

People are getting used to new ways of consuming digital content.

With empty stadiums and arenas, live content has become the closest fans can get to live-action. High-quality content is more important now than it has ever been.

Customer Experience tools are on the rise, and Live Blog and Live Chat are quickly becoming the best ally for businesses that rely on content creation and distribution.

Why Live Blog?

A live blog is, put simply, a curated news feed that can be integrated into websites, providing rolling coverage of any event in real-time. It combines content that is usually fragmented across the web, complementing articles and written stories with images, videos, tweets, polls, live group chats, and other digital assets that can be embedded in the feed.

Live blogs are widely used for breaking news coverage as they consolidate reported information to content pieces from outside the news organization, like user-generated content and inputs from social media. 

It’s a transparent format in which journalists can update and attach multiple formats in an easy-to-digest layout. 

How to leverage a live chat to cover real-time events?

A Live Chat is a communication platform that enables users to engage in relevant conversations with each other. Live Chats are commonly used on the coverage of live events to provide an instant communication channel to users of a specific website, for instance. 

A Live Chat is the ideal option for companies that want to provide real-time interactions for customers who are browsing their website, learning about their products, and analyzing the brand’s reliability, for example.

Globo TV and the NBA Finals

Looking for fresh and real-time alternatives to provide valuable content to its customers, Rede Globo, the second-largest commercial TV network in the world, made a pioneering move by adopting two of Arena’s CX solutions to broadcast the NBA Live finals.

Using the Arena Live Blog to cover the matches – play-by-play – and the Arena Live Chat to enable passionate discussions amongst fans, Globo had audience peaks of tens of thousands of users following its Live Blog coverage concurrently. Their Live Chat, which was only open for Globo’s paying subscribers, had over four thousand users at the same time.

Covering such an important event, during a pandemic, can be even more challenging for journalists. Besides reporting on the game, they need to keep an eye on everything that’s happening off the court.

The best way to put all the news together and deliver it to its users is through the Arena Live Blog. Globo used our Live Blog as a sort of “second-screen content” to its users while the finals were going on and aggregated news about the teams, players, and fans.

Dynamic and extremely interactive, the Arena Live Blog allowed the TV network to bring different post formats and sources together to deliver real-time updates for their instant audience. 

Globo live blogged the NBA finals through several content formats, such as videos, audios, texts, and social media posts to shape a diverse and more interactive feed. They also used live polls with game-related questions, to increase user’s interaction.  

We can say Globo mastered the art of live blogging. Already widely popular among their soccer fans, the TV network is now bringing the same recipe – anticipation, hype, real-time – to the national basketball league.

During its live transmission, Globo also embedded paid ads into their Live Blog to increase revenue. The TV network learned that it’s easier to sell when your audience’s interest is peaking. 

And when you have tens of thousands of users simultaneously watching your Live Blog, engaging in polls and Live Chats discussions, it’s fair to assume that user engagement is no longer a problem.

By curating and providing real-time updates from people literally on the inside of the game, Globo had the ability to immerse their viewers in the game like they are actually there. 

With the Live Blog coverage of the NBA finals, Globo also managed to engage paid users in exciting discussions about the game, plays, and players.

In quarantine times, having real-time and play-by-play updates, inside coverage, discussions – sometimes heated – with other fans following the same game, it’s not too much to say this is the closest sports fan will get to a real sports arena.

Providing multimedia content and an innovative narrative experience to its audience is already paying off to Globo. The TV network made the Arena CX solutions a central piece of their communication strategy, and it’s seeing a relevant growth in user engagement, time spent on their web domains, and ROI.

With the Arena Live Blog and Live Chat, the possibilities are endless.

You can also create experiences like Globo did in the NBA broadcast. Take a free trial now and see for yourself.