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A year of innovation: BBC News and Social Media in 2015 - BBC News

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2015 has been a year full of new social media initiatives for BBC News and Current Affairs.
We've expanded our activity on chat apps, experimented with a number of live-streaming services and
short-form video formats and won a host of awards for our efforts.
Our digital current affairs team used Snapchat to explore new ways of reaching a millennial audience
through digital story-telling around the migrant crisis for BBC Panorama.
The same programme also launched a
new digital-first, social media project to
reach and engage a broad audience online
and on social media, including those
communities affected by the closure of
steelworks in Redcar over 50 days in the
countdown to Christmas.
BBC Pop Up started the year in a desert
and ended near the Arctic. Somewhere
between those two points, the video
journalism team hosted town meetings in
Twitter links to John Sweeney's Snapchat reports for Panorama
Africa and across North America. They
experimented with Facebook live streams in the Northwest Territories, posing questions from across the
world to residents in real-time. They also took questions from Twitter into African slums in Kenya and
crowdsourced dozens of story ideas from East African residents. With the help of social media, they
uncovered Vatican scientists searching for alien life in Arizona and forged a new partnership with the
messaging app Yik Yak during the Canadian elections.

Yik Yak message asking

Elsewhere, BBC News has looked to make

the most of the growth in use of chat apps,
as referenced by my colleague Trushar Barot
in a recent report for the Tow Center. The
BBC has used messaging technologies to
reach audiences in hard-to-reach parts of the
world. BBC Persian launched a new service
on the anonymous chat app, Telegram. The
app is widely used by many Iranians and
within a month of launch it had 200,000
subscribers, with some items posted
reaching more than 800,000 unique users
inside the platform.

We've also witnessed an exponential increase in eyewitness contributions to news events through
WhatsApp over the year and launched a "lifeline service" on Viber to reach people with news and
information during the Nepal earthquake.
Earlier
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the year we took the decision to rationalise our presence on Facebook and toJancreate
a single
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04:51:43AM MST

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-the-editors-35061802

Earlier in the year we took the decision to rationalise our presence on Facebook and to create a single
page for BBC News on the platform. The page has looked to highlight the most newsworthy and shareable
stories for fans on Facebook and has already proven its ability to engage millions:
Image copyright Facebook/BBC
On Instagram, we launched new pop-up
channels for the UK General Election:
and our #100Women season:
Image copyright
Instagram/BBC News

A Facebook screengrab showing a video and metrics

And the BBC News Channel surpassed a

million subscribers, with a number of new
short-form video formats.
This year's #100Women season produced an
array of engaging content and held debates that
trended on social media in Nigeria, Nepal, Kabul
and London at different times.

Instagram picture showing Lubna Qassim

From Meerkat during the Ferguson protests to

Periscope during the recent Paris attacks and
most recently on Facebook Mentions,
live-streaming on social media has clearly been
one of the big talking points of the year. BBC
reporters and correspondents were quick to
experiment in this arena - most noticeably around
breaking and developing news and for

behind-the-scenes expert analysis.

Our social media innovation has been noticed in a favourable light over the course or the last year. A
"lifeline" Ebola service we launched through WhatsApp won a George Foster Peabody Award for public
service and a Knight Award for public service at the Online News Association Conference. BBC Trending
and BBC News won social media Webby awards and @BBCBreaking won an Online Media Award for a
second year running. No doubt 2016 will bring many more challenges and opportunities for innovation.
(With thanks to, Matt Danzico, Ravin Sampat, Ramaa Sharma and Trushar Barot for their contributions).
Image copyright Instagram/BBC News

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