Building Social Media Engagement at the BBC

Social Media engagement, really matters

I spent over 8 years at the BBC in multiple roles, but in the vast majority of them, I created digital content to engage with audiences.

In my last chapter, I was heavily involved in bringing the BBC to the forefront of social media. At the time (circa 2011) the BBC was seen as the place to go for breaking news but not as a place for engagement, least of all places in social media.

There were two main problems that we needed to fix: 1) BBC Journalists understanding and engaging on social media; 2) the BBC itself changing its social media strategy from referrals only (how many people clicked on a link on a social post to come to our sites) to engagement as the main metric (are our posts making a difference? having an impact?).

For the first one, I spent some time in the BBC Academy and BBC College of Journalism training my colleagues on social media and how to harness its power. It was a very rich experience since at the time the BBC operated in 30 languages, including English.

For the second challenge, I moved to head the Social Media strategy for the BBC World Service in all those languages. Immediately, we started to change things focusing on engagement and keeping a close track of our performance in a custom-built dashboard in 5 languages: Spanish, Russian, Portuguese, Arabic and Turkish.

The results were great. By focusing on engagement we increased those precious referrals. Our audience was not only engaging in conversation with us and am long them, but they were also visiting our content even more!

And to be even more innovative, we launched the first-ever Social Media-only language service by putting BBC Thai on Facebook at a time when agility matter more than anything since a military coup had just occurred in Thailand

I also had the privilege of working in a few more digital roles at the Beeb (our friendly name for the BBC) before heading out to Instagram.

A few of them were:

*A blog where I analysed the latest trends in the tech world and how they affected our daily lives
*Video Editor
*Senior Editor in the Global Video Unit, a video creation department in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Persian, Russian and Urdu

Can't wait to show you why engagement really matters!