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October 25, 2022

7 Must-Have Live Blogging Software Features for Large Events

Journalism: 7 Must-Have Live Blogging Software Features for Large Events

7 Must-Have Live Blogging Software Features for Large Events

By Jenny Dabon |  October 25, 2022

Live blogging is a brilliant method to produce real-time content while maintaining social connections and audience participation in a society where information spreads faster every day.

The interactive aspect of online discussions, coupled with easier and more efficient methods, allows everyone to report on something occurring in the present, regardless of location.

Live blogging is a contemporary method for providing real-time information on a topic or event through text, photo, video, and audio content. Its foundation consists of a single page or content automatically refreshed upon uploading new content.

Why Use Live Blog Software?

Real-time news delivery is essential in today’s globalised world. However, publishing news items is a lengthy process. Gathering data, conducting interviews, editing photographs, and styling articles takes time, even for a brief piece.

Here is where the live blogging platform comes into play. Live blogging consists of publishing continuous updates to a  blog on a live event instead of a report after the engagement has concluded.

If you can deliver regular information and insightful commentary via live blogging during a tech product launch, your viewers will likely turn to your site for event coverage. Additionally, live blogging may increase your blog’s presence in web queries and rank with search engines.

When an event occurs, you may use a live blogging platform to update a live blog on your site, publish the same content to all your social media accounts, and embed social media features into your live blog with one click.

According to Regional Research Reports, the global  live blog software industry was worth more than $688 million USD in 2021 and is expected to hit more than $1.45 billion in 2030, with an annual growth of 9.43 percent between 2022 to 2030.

Must-Have Live Blogging Features

1. Image Slideshows

By using the picture slideshow tool, rather than posting a single photo in a post, you can arrange many photos and display them to your viewers as a photo collection.

2. Rich Media Posts

Offer a multimedia experience to your audience by adding animated GIFs and incorporating image slideshows, video streams, and other multimedia forms in your publish feed.

3. Social Media Post

Software used for blogging has a built-in and user-friendly social search where you can search for and integrate content from social platforms quickly and easily.

4. User Comments

The user commenting capability of live blogging software enables you to include immediate comments in real-time. Readers can express their perspectives on the topic you’re reporting on, contribute valuable information, and provide eyewitness accounts. A reliable live blogging solution lets viewers interact immediately with your live blog via mobile devices.

5. Blog Analytics

The analytics tool enables you to monitor your live blog’s unique views in each embedded location. Analysing performance based on data allows you to determine what works, and what doesn’t.

6. Custom Post Types

You can determine what to show your audience with a few basic and quick options. The live blog software tools provide a range of embedded code that offers the most significant user experience without requiring complex programming.

7. SEO Optimisation

Embedding native or remote advertisements into your live blog’s timeline is one way to  monetise live coverage. Optimising your live blog SEO features may increase your search engine ranks and attract more visitors.

According to Search Engine Journal, 49 percent of marketers cite organic search as the marketing channel with the highest return on investment. So, ensuring that your live blogging solution offers SEO optimisation features is important.

Live Blogging Strategy for Events

1. Choose a Live Blogging Platform

Using a live blogging platform, such as Live Blog Pro, gives you advantages over your blog. These solutions include content walls, event statistics, private chat rooms, spam management, and more to help you engage your viewers and promote social engagement.

Furthermore, you can incorporate your live blog into your blog, increasing the visibility of your event coverage. A live blogging solution also enables contributors to publish on your live blog and allows you to immediately live-stream the event.

2. Prepare Before the Event

You must select a relevant activity with the appropriate audience. The live event should be related to your niche and appealing to your followers. You must also create goals for your live blogging. Finally, you should prepare as much as possible before the event because you will need to publish updates immediately.

  • Check Event Website

An event’s website is an excellent starting point for researching. For example, if a product launch features LMS systems for educational institutions, you can visit its website for more information. You can obtain the event’s schedule and information on its speakers, partners, learning management systems providers, and business participants. With this data, you can conduct additional research about LMS systems and develop essential content for your live blog, including links and speaker details.

  • Reach Out to the Speakers

If the live event has a webpage, it will likely include the event’s itinerary and speakers. Try contacting them on social networks and informing them of your intention to film the event. And if they interact with you, express your enthusiasm to hear from them.

  • Create Templates and Graphics 

Incorporating images is beneficial because it engages readers and improves SEO. According to a recent study by Microsoft, the human attention span has dropped to eight seconds. This is why it is crucial to get your audience’s attention through visually pleasing elements.

However, generating graphics takes time, so you should try creating them in advance by using online tools like Canva. If this is not feasible, you should build or download design templates with adequate space to incorporate event-related information or quotations.

  • Prepare to Talk to Your Viewers

People appreciate insider information about events. You must therefore draft questions to ask the event’s presenters and attendees. You can obtain their perspectives on the event if you speak with the presenters. Alternatively, you may talk with participants and inquire about their impressions of the event.

You can also inform your social media followers that you will conduct interviews during the event and request questions. You may be stunned by the inventiveness and inquisitiveness of event-related question-askers.

  • Post Live Event Blog Coverage

For live blogging breaking news as it occurs, use live blogging solutions, such as Live Blog Reporter, and beat the race with personalised, real-time, interactive news and content.

  • Live Stream at the Event

If you want to enhance your audience’s experience after the function, you can live stream in addition to live blogging. It helps your viewers receive a more complete and detailed account of the event.

If you have a team, one of you can operate the live-streaming camera while others live blog. If you are traveling alone to the event don’t forget a tripod. You can place the camera on a tripod and concentrate on live blogging while the device handles live streaming.

Check if the live blogging service you use to cover the event enables live streaming. If so, you can stream live directly to the blogging platform. If it doesn’t, choose a site with the largest viewership, such as YouTube.

  • Maintain Connection with Audience After the Event

You might explore expanding the event’s coverage to reach a broader audience. You can then publish your live blog on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Blogging in real time should always be organised with the primary objective in mind. Covering events and news is a means, not an aim.

Insertions such as advertisements, connections to other information, QR codes, and calls-to-action will become beneficial when many viewers are attentive.

All of the engagement generated by live broadcasting may be utilised to generate leads. A CRM tool can easily divide leads into groups and put them on lists to make following up easier. Browse through Pipedrive reviews to learn how they can help you keep track of deals and events.

Interest, context, and worth constitute the formula for convincing customers to take the subsequent move in their journey toward you and your business.

Enhance Live Blogging Experience with Live Blogging Solution

Journalism

Photo by Flo Dahm, taken from Pexels

Regardless of the events you choose to cover or the strategies and tools you use for your approach, using live blogging software is an excellent approach to engage your followers and promote your brand while participating in significant events. Integrating with larger, more comprehensive marketing tactics becomes a valuable asset for a company’s brand.

Looking for a better live blogging solution? Try out Live Blog from Sourcefabric for seven days free, no strings attached. Get your trial version here.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.

October 12, 2022

The Benefits of Live Blogging for Your News Business

Introducing Live Blog 3.7

The Benefits of Live Blogging for Your News Business

by Manolis Zografakis |  October 12, 2022

Engaging audiences with real-time involvement through live blogging improves a user’s experience and yields many other benefits for a news business, including expanded reach and higher profits. Nowadays, online users have developed a certain expectation regarding the speed with which they may access and enjoy content online. They are interested in current events as they are happening, which is why more and more people are starting to consume content through live blogs.

Live blogging platforms offer an alternate communication method with a news company’s target market through live, interactive content. They allow for content to be compiled from multiple sources rather than just one. Simply put, journalists and editors using live blogging software such as Live Blog Pro gather data from several sources and put it together using social media inputs and photos.

A strategy that includes posting updates regularly, covering events as they happen, or reporting breaking news in real-time would benefit significantly from a Live Blog solution. Since live blogs provide readers with breaking news and are easy to navigate, they are also suitable for readers to consume news while on the go, because the content is easily digestible in small chunks.

Live blogging has a huge potential to pique online news readers’ interest in current affairs coverage and encourage them to take action.

What Is Live Blogging?

Like traditional blogs, live blogging focuses primarily on textual documentation of events. As its name implies, live blogging involves publishing simultaneously  as an ongoing event, updating the coverage as things happen. Think of a live blog as a rolling text that constantly updates its viewers.

A live blog combines several media types and data feeds to produce information in real time. If your plan involves making frequent updates, covering live events, or reporting breaking news, a live blog solution is precisely what you need. Have a look at these live blog examples.There are many reasons why live blogging is the present and future of multimedia client involvement in all fields, from journalism to politics. Let’s take a look at a few of them.

13 Benefits of Live Blogging for the New Business

Live blogging is used by news organisations for several purposes, including expanding their audience, making the news-gathering process more open and accessible, boosting reader participation, and even bringing in extra money via blog syndication.

1. Increase Customer Engagement

Your audience will be exposed to a new mode of real time interaction and information dissemination when you implement live blogging. To get your audience to care about your organisation and content, having features like in-feed comments and live streaming of events is essential.

2. Maximise Your Return on Investment

Live blogs, if managed properly, have the potential to generate a return on investment that is unmatched by most other channels. From having a major sponsor of the live blog to having multiple ads showing up throughout the feed, the commercial advantages of a live blog are many. Also, remember that a live blog can be a “living” blog that is continuously updated (for example, live blogs about Covid have been updated for nearly three years). The potential for additional content is increased with each new live event.

3. Develop User Interaction

Live blogs are a great way to get your news audience involved since they are lively and dynamic. Users can engage with your live blog in several ways, including asking questions, providing feedback, or retweeting posts.

4. Provide Exclusive Content

Providing users with information  they can’t get elsewhere is a noble goal, and live blogging exclusive content is a fantastic approach to achieving it. Ways to do this range from interviews to collaborations to exclusive coverages, and each can be implemented in various ways.

5. Widen Your Audience

Through the SEO-optimised themes of Live Blog Pro, you can attract more organic readers to your blog. There are two main ways to expand your readership: By encouraging people to chat about your live blog content, and by having them suggest your news business to others they think might enjoy reading what you report.

6. Stay Ahead of the Competition With Advance Planning

You may set yourself apart from the competition by planning your live blog in advance. There are plenty of events that you could start blogging before they happen, such as elections, conferences, and sports matches. With Live Blog’s post scheduling functionality, you can even write content ahead of time and set it to be published at any time in the future.

7. Gain Valuable Insights

Providing coverage of an event is only one aspect of live blogging. Remember that you’ll need a plan for the times before, during, and after your coverage is broadcast. You can learn a lot about your audience and what they need from you if you take the time to observe and listen to how they respond to your coverage.

8. Live Blog On The Go

With live blogging, timing is everything. Providing live coverage loses its value and importance if it is not posted immediately. Thankfully, the Live Blog Reporter app lets your reporters contribute content directly from their mobile phones.

9. Be Accessible

Live blogging can be adapted to the style of your news organisation while still being user-friendly and mobile-friendly. In addition, its speed and user-friendliness will provide the impression that you are more accessible to your audience.

10. Establish Authority

Your news organisation may establish credibility by providing readers with timely, relevant content that is addressed consistently and engagingly. If visitors to your live blog feel like they’ve learned something new, they’ll be more likely to come back for updates in the future.

11. Give Context

In liveblogging, the tale you convey will be highly potent because of how much emphasis you put on context. When reporting news, sometimes all you need to do is set the scene for your viewers or readers. Live blogging gives you an excellent opportunity to use narrative to connect with your audience on an emotional level.

12. Make the News More Exciting To Read

Many people ignore articles that don’t make them feel like they’re part of the action. Live blogging provides the opposite, letting readers engage with in-the-moment news coverage.

13. Maximise The Efficiency Of The Editorial Process

Today’s fast-paced world emphasises the importance of maximising efficiency wherever possible. Live Blog streamlines and accelerates the editorial process by automatically mining content from various sources.

Transform Your News Business With Live Blogging

With all this theoretical knowledge about the benefits of live blogging at your disposal, it’s time to put it into practice and learn how to live blog. Get ready to interact with your readers, share content, and build your reputation as a news industry leader.

Ready to begin liveblogging?

Getting started has never been easier.