One of the best parts about traveling is telling your family, friends and loved ones all of your adventurous stories. Sharing photos on Instagram or updating your Facebook status with your location don’t give your viewer the full perspective of your experiences abroad. Keeping an up-to-date blog and enhancing it with professional quality videos, geo-mapped location updates and live video feeds really allows your audience to experience the warmth of the tropical beaches or the breeze of the snowy mountainside.
Here are three ways to intensify your live-share travel stories.
Upgrade Your Smartphone
Live-sharing your adventures requires a smartphone with a camera that will transport your viewers and make them feel as if they’re right there with you. The 4K video capabilities of the iPhone 6s Plus from will do just that. The “4K” refers to the number of pixels across a video’s horizontal dimension, approximately 4,000 in this case. When compared to HD video, 4K actually has more pixels and provides much greater detail. It brings your images to life, making them sharper, more realistic, focusing on technical details, color spaces and frame-rate.
A comparison done in 2015 by Fstoppers, a community-based photography news website, the iPhone’s 4K video capabilities actually surpassed those of their $3,000 DSLR when there was enough light present. In addition to the superb video quality, Fstoppers recommends shooting in 4K because you have more megapixels to work with if you need to crop a video and the video quality is so good, that you can pull still frames from your video. As a blogging traveler, that means never having to choose between recording a moment or photographing a moment. With 4K video capabilities, you can essentially do both simultaneously.
Utilize LiveTrekker
As a blogger, you rely on the power of your words with the support of photos and videos to tell your story. What about a new method of storytelling that follows and records your movement with GPS on a map, while allowing you to embellish with photography, videos, comments or voice recordings while they’re happening. LiveTrekker, available as a smartphone app and online, keeps up with your life on the go as a professional traveler. Long gone are the days of uploading photos or videos at the end of the day. LiveTrekker uploads in real time and gives your followers an inside look at every step you’ve taken through your journey.
The most convenient part is that you don’t have to stick solely to the LiveTrekker smartphone app or website, all you need to do is send an email requesting the plugin they have already created that allows you to share a trip directly onto your personal blog or website by simply adding an additional line of code.
Embedding Live Video Feeds Into Your Blog
With apps and features such as Instagram Story, Snapchat and Facebook Live, it’s very easy to reach your followers in real time while you’re traveling. It’s even possible to embed your live feeds into your blog to attract more visitors. Facebook Live, one of the most effective methods to reach a large audience of online viewers through video, engages your fans and followers while allowing them to interact with you directly via comments or live reactions to the video. Although Facebook Live is in real time, it’s a good idea to forewarn your viewers on Facebook and on your blog, when you plan on going live and asking them to tune in.
Once you have completed recording your live video and pressed the Finish button, your video is still accessible on your Facebook profile. In order to embed the Facebook Live video into a blog, such as WordPress, you’ll need to download a plugin such as the WP Facebook Live Video plugin. This will allow you to share your live videos directly to your blog audience without requiring them to visit your Facebook account.