Live blogging at events boosts engagement with content by 300% according to new research into content marketing techniques with readers explaining what boosts content engagement. Here’s why…
Liveblogging is becoming a popular format for covering major breaking news stories, sports events, and scheduled news on the web.
In a study of liveblogs on the Guardian, City Londonn University found that the format was getting 300 per cent more views and 233 per cent more visitors than conventional online news articles on the same subject.
According to the researchers the conversational nature of the format appeals to readers and is perceived as ‘more objective’.
There is a convenience factor too: online readers are able to follow the unfolding of a story on a single page and can see how it develops in more or less real time.
The research, conducted by Dr Neil Thurman and Anna Walters from the university’s journalism school, is regarded as the first major study into the live blogging phenomenon.
“We believe live blogs are so popular because they meet readers’ changing news consumption preferences,” says Thurman. “More and more news is being consumed at work, in the office.
“Live blogs provide this ‘news-at-work’ audience with what they’re looking for: regular follow-up information on breaking news in ‘bite-sized nuggets’ which they can read – as several readers told us – while they are supposed to be working.”
The Thurman-Walters study also looked at how live blogs are constructed. They found that because live blogging journalists work so fast – often publishing updates every 20 minutes for six hours straight – there is little time for fact-checking.
Despite that, readers feel that live blogs are less opinionated and “more factual” than traditional articles written with care after an event.
Thurman believes that’s because “the looser culture of collaboration is offset by live blogs’ use of a relatively large number of sources, and transparent citation and correction practices.”
And readers don’t just passively read live blogs – they like to comment. The researchers found that readers were twice as likely to participate with live blogs than with other articles.
Read the full report here