Arena: A Useful Tool To Live Blog Real Time Events

In this blog we’re taking a look at Arena – a really useful tool to live blog real time events.

Many people around the world enjoy live events and experiences, from sports to news to technology and even finance. Many of these events are broadcast in real-time on television, radio, and social media platforms to reach the largest number of people possible.

Arena is a cross-platform live blogging and chat tool which allows publishers and editors to show their content curation in more dynamic ways.

Arena does that by keeping everything together in one helpful dashboard, so there is no need to have multiple Internet tabs open for different social platforms or websites to cover an event in real-time.

Arena is also mobile responsive and incredibly mobile-friendly, as it can be accessed on tablets and all mobile devices plus desktops.

Arena is a cloud-based platform for covering real-time events. It can aggregate, curate, and distribute content to any device anywhere in the world, whenever you need it.

Arena optimizes audience engagement and lead conversion while creating new experiences, monetizing content, and extracting real-time analytics.

Anyone has the ability to use live blogs, from simple bloggers to major publishers. Bloggers and professional bloggers can curate real-time experiences.

What is A Live Blog?

A live blog is a blog post that provides real-time coverage of an ongoing event. This blog post can include different format types and is easily added to new websites for rolling coverage of a specific event.

In addition, live blogs tend to include various content formats like social media posts, comments, videos, and more to create one high-quality multimedia narrative for people to easily follow.

How Does Arena Work?

After installing the plugin and creating an account, the Arena user-friendly dashboard can simply walk you through the steps of creating a live blog. Just select the live blog icon from the left-hand sidebar, click the blue “Get Started” button, and get started.

Start your five-step process for creating your live event. These steps are choosing a category, adding social streams, adding live event information, adding conversation options, and adding monetization options.

Choose from six different categories to decide what category your event fits into or simply choose another. The next step is to centralize all of your social media streams to the Arena dashboard.

When you do this, all of the social pages you need to access will appear as streams in the dashboard so you won’t need to open a bunch of tabs and constantly be checking them in real-time.

Next, you want to set your event details to determine whether it is a live or upcoming event. Include information like the locations, date, time, description, and preferred language. This information can be changed or altered at a later time.

Do you want to enable comments of live chat during the event? Simply choose the option to do so, and select which part of the screen you would like the chat option to appear.

It’s simple to monetize your event by connecting your advertising platforms, such as Google AdSense, AppNexus or DoubleClick for Publishers, once the event is created.

Once those steps are completed the event can begin!

Using The Live Blog

In the post area, you have the option to add anything you want, including videos, images, and embeds from social media. You can also tag people in a post and explain add an action like “watching (insert sports game here)” so people know what you’re doing.

In addition, posts can include hashtags and posts can be both monitored or automatically sent out. There is also a helpful feed stream on the right side of the page so the timeline can be viewed and managed easily. Posts can also be edited, deleted, or pinned from the feed.

Within the feed, users have the option to use a search function to find hashtags, keywords, user profiles, or choose a social media stream to monitor.

Also, there is a library option where content can be dragged and dropped to more easily be added to the feed. These uploaded pieces can also be organized into a full library for easier access in the future.

The conversation tab is the place to check out the live chat and start engaging with other users. The comments from posts can also be seen in a separate tab. The chat can also be fully monetized, with people giving cash tips, gifts, or donations.

There is also a helpful analytics section that breaks down your live blog numbers quite simply.

Find out how many users are online, how many users are online per device, the number of real-time page views, the average session time, as well as page views per device (mobile vs. desktop) and the origin of visitors by country.

Here you can also view the amount of engagement including post comments, chat messages, and reactions.

Pricing Tiers

Arena is available for download at from WordPress.org, and and premium features can be found at arena.im.

Currently, there are four plans. The Basic plan supports 5,000 pageviews/month. The Professional plan supports 25,000 pageviews/month and is $49/month annually. The Business plan has more flexibility for page views and features and is $149/month annually. The Enterprise plan is tailored to the client.

Check the plan pricings.

Conclusion

Arena is a useful tool for anyone who wants to centrally locate all of their online media in one place for an event.

Basically, users and companies can have more control over their own social media presence through Live Blog, instead of streaming across multiple platforms like Facebook and Twitter to get access to more users.

This tool is effective for integrating all types of media from images, video, and social streams into one helpful dashboard so users can see all the information and make updates or changes in real-time, as well as respond to engagements like comments or likes.

Lastly, the analytics of each live blog are easily shown on a tab in the dashboard so it’s simple to check the reach of the live blog from time to time.