Add GIFs and Emojis to your live blog
Live blogs are by their nature less formal, more straightforward, and generally contains less text than articles and full-length pieces. As a format for covering conferences, provide live sport commentary, or publish election updates live news feeds often make use of social media, videos, and pictures to enrich content.
A less used form of communication is animated GIFs and Emojis (Unicode icons) which are very effective at communicating visually and effectively with readers. Because more and more readers are consuming content through mobile devices, using GIFs and emojis presents a great opportunity for live bloggers to catch readers’ attention.
Fortunately, Live Center allows for easy use of both GIFs and Emojis in live blogs. These can be retrieved from many different sources, but for the examples below I have used Giphy.com and Emojipedia.org, two widely used sources.
Adding an Emoji to your live blog
To start off, navigate to Emoijpedia.org and search for the emoji you want to include in your post.
Next, simply mark and copy the emoji to your clipboard
Finally, paste the emoji into Live Center’s editor and voila! Your posts is now more visually engaging and not as bland as a pure text-post!
Adding an animated GIF to your live blog
Go to your preferred source of quality GIFs such as Giphy.com and search and find the GIF you want to add. Such as this ”Confused look” GIF
Next click Embed to get an embed code. We will use this to embed the GIF inside our Live Center post
Head back to your Live Center live blog and click the Add media dropdown menu in the upper-hand corner of the Editor. Navigate to the Embedoption, paste in the embed code you copied from giphy.com, and click Add
The GIF has now been added as an embedded object to your post. You can also add any additional text or other media to the post before publishing it to your audience.
Want to try out live blogging with GIFs and Emojis yourself? Head over to our Live Center page and sign up for our free 30-day trial.
