Multimedia content can certainly enhance a blog in many ways. Using multimedia can reinforce the story that you are telling by providing different voices and showing differing opinions. It can also make the content easier for someone to read, by breaking it up and fully engaging your audience. By involving use of different senses through multimedia tools, your blog can provide quality content to your readers and help you to “create a single resource full of useful information that will engage your readers and keep them interested” (Smith, 2013)
Visual aids can easily grab a reader’s attention, and can bring closer attention to the written content you’ve included. Multimedia content can also make your blog more easily found by search engines, making it more easily found by people looking for similar content. In example, “any images that you add to your posts can also be found on Google Images”, helping to drive traffic to your particular blog (Smith, 2013). Other types of multimedia content you can add to your blog to make it more appealing are videos, pictures, podcasts, hyperlinks, infographics, social media, slideshows, and audio. Each of these should be used to enhance and not overwhelm your content. Make sure to use these when they make the most sense and also where they break up your written content. This makes both the multimedia content and written content of your blog easier to digest by your audience.
Also, you should pay attention to what types of multimedia you use within your blog. Some types work better with different written content. Also, you should be sure to not completely overwhelm your written content with multimedia. Having a video placed every paragraph or two can be distracting to a reader. You might also want to think about “going back over some old content and adding something new to refresh it” (Smith, 2014). Multimedia embedded in a blog can elevate your content from that of a traditional newspaper article to a fully integrated resource that provides the reader with many different sources of information. A good resource for different, easy-to-use multimedia types is the website Educational Resource Tools: Multimedia Tools. Take a look at this site to get some additional ideas.
A few sites with quality multimedia examples are listed below. These sites utilize multimedia to enhance their content and make it much more visually appealing to their audiences. These are very good examples of how to use multimedia content in different ways that I’ve personally engaging as well.
- http://www.nola.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/04/meraux_foundation_embroiled_in.html
- http://www.duckrabbit.info/
- http://www.multimediamuse.org/
- http://hollowdocumentary.com/
References
Smith, M. (2013) Why multimedia blog content is good for your website. Retrieved from http://www.benchmarkemail.com/blogs/detail/why-multimedia-blog-content-is-good-for-your-site
Sundar, S. (2000) Multimedia effects on processing and perception of online news: a study of picture, audio, and video downloads. Retrieved from http://www.journalism.wisc.edu/~dshah/blog-club/site/Sundar.pdf
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