Making news ‘palatable’ in real-time defines the success of online media platforms. If you’re already a part of this industry, you’re probably no stranger to the challenges your brand has encountered amidst stiff competition.
Successful digital platforms, including OTT, media, and website owners, have been working with online engagement software like Viafoura. If you are wondering how live blogging can take journalism to the next level, we’ve got you covered in this article.
How relevant is live blogging to journalism?
Stale news is no news, or so goes the saying, but how the news is delivered is also very important. This makes it necessary to provide incoming updates on relevant topics to your readers at the earliest possible time. Live blogging is a strategy that supports community growth by allowing digital media brands the chance to engage with their audience.
- Between 2016 and 2018, the number of US citizens reading news on online portals rose from 28% to 34%. Over the last few years, these figures have further increased.
- Live blogging necessarily involves the publication of real-time news. Along with features like commenting, social integrations, shareability, and reviews, media houses have revolutionized their approach to reach their audience.
- Live blogging is relatively easy compared to traditional journalism or even online journalism in its initial stages.
- However, it’s imperative to partner with an experienced content engagement team to maximize your digital footprint.
- In the last couple of decades, blogging has emerged as an unofficial substitute for traditional journalism.
- With the inception of live blogging, media brands can integrate their own brand and value into any news. You can even present the development more comprehensively than TV news or branded online news portals.
Whether you own an OTT or a news platform, you calculate your success through clicks and engagement. This is exactly what live blogging is all about. Think of dispatching instantaneous updates on sports events, conferences, political meetings, elections, or anything that engages your readers. Moreover, you can integrate photos on your live blog along with other multimedia elements.
How has live blogging added value to journalism?
Traditionally, media houses present limited coverage to any development. Moreover, they have their own in-house policies that often restrict reporters and news writers from exploring different angles of the incident. However, with live blogging, you can explore the subtler aspects of any news with your unique interpretation. This enriches the overall journalistic value of the content.
Here’s how live blogging can add value to journalism.
1. Real-time news updates
With traditional media, people hardly get real-time updates on the coverage. Even if live coverage is available on TV sets, non-portability prevents many people from staying hooked.
However, live blogging enables media brands to instantly circulate information on mobile devices through push notifications. This enables the audience to get a spontaneous update on the developments.
2. In-depth news publication
TV and print media have time constraints since they have subsequent events scheduled. This prevents them from interpreting the developments in detail. On the other hand, live blogs enable digital media brands to shape the content with their own interpretations and flavours to develop a unique culture.
With live blogging, you can also include commentary and news to feed high-value updates to your readers. It’s a small wonder then that OTT platforms are gaining recurring popularity across the globe.
3. Complementing primary news sources
Whether it’s about a movie launch or a major business deal, people are always looking for additional or secondary news sources. While the primary media channels deliver the crux of the event, it’s difficult for them to get the subtler details due to time and resource constraints. This is where live blogging enriches journalism with a secondary news source.
Whether you run a website or an OTT, you can develop finer details that will engage your readers. Using the right technology can also help you follow social media trends and dispatch news updates based on analytics. This way, you can cater to your audience with information that’s relevant to them.
4. Social integrations
Fostering online engagement ensures that the news you share will enjoy high social shareability. Now, it’s possible to collect information from comments and interactions left by your readers. This lets you analyze their response and plan your future content accordingly.
You own all the data when you partner with established professionals to establish social integration on your own platform. While your brand enjoys more shares on social media platforms, the information serves to help you assess the right content publication strategy.
5. SEO benefits
While you might be too engrossed with providing timely updates, it’s easy to overlook the SEO benefits of live blogging.
- When you publish any content on your website or blog, you can integrate relevant keywords.
- With quality backlinking, you can strengthen your digital presence.
- Moreover, the published content comes with a relatively longer lifeline than traditional news.
- With the right SEO strategy, search engines can continue to direct traffic to your posts long after the event has taken place.
6. Two-way interactions
Feedback happens to be one of the key ingredients in your content publication strategy. Unless you know the pulse of your readers, it can be challenging to post fresh content. Now, with live blogging, you have the comments section open. This is not possible with traditional news channels. It implies that you can check your readers’ comments in real-time and mould your strategy accordingly. Besides, it helps you to answer their queries through your subsequent publications.
Endnote
Live blogging has transformed online journalism with the power of timeliness. In an era when seconds matter to define the relevance of news, it’s worth embracing live blogging as a content marketing strategy.
Since most media brands recognize the benefits live blogging brings when looking to engage an audience, using this strategy is a sure-fire way to generate more engagement.