Who’s winning the social media war?
Telecom and radio broadcasting have been comfortable bedfellows for a while now, have they not? At least, since the days after listeners would not have to wait to send a letter to the producer after a show, but get involved in the show as it happens.
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It was first phone call when the airwaves was liberated in the mid-90s, which ended up creating celebrity status for the likes of Ahiakpor and Carlos Von Brazzi. Short Message Sending (SMS) also found its way into the mix early on and listeners could join in at will and provided their text gets through or the producer and presenter were willing to, they’ll hear their view on the show.
During the heavy SMS era when the telecoms and earlier VAS companies made a killing from how many number of text messages were sent, you needed any working mobile phone to be able to send your message through. Then we got caught in the smartphone era and the terms changed somewhat.
The telecoms are pushing data now because they are into business and every one of them knows that voice is saturated and to be able to create a lot more value for their business, they ought to play in the data space, hence, that has become the new frontier of competition in the telecom space. There are even 4G LTE operators around to compete with the traditional telecom companies.
Consequently or otherwise, the broadcast industry moved along. What used to be SMS-based solely has moved on to Whatsapp and other apps on the smartphone based conversation between presenters and their listeners. It is not as though SMS is totally dead, it is dominant still but the other means of sending message to radio shows are taking over.
Which brings us to the main meal of this conversation, which is social media and how the broadcast media are taking advantage to integrate them into their programming and how that makes it possible for listeners to be part of the content co-creation process.
The fact has to be established here and clearly so that the long held notion that “content is king” may be trite but tried and tested truism. How you get the audience coming back to you is a function of what they get from you anytime they have a contact with your station or programme.
This fact is more pronounced in the era of many opportunities to receive content. If you are a radio station and you snooze a little, you lose big time. Your audience would not wait for you, they move to the other guy who gives them the content they want.
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Remember that in a pluralistic environment, people have choices to make and if yours is not what they like, they go to the next place to find it. Which is why some broadcast organisations the world over have found ways to engage their audience in the digital space.
In Ghana, and in Accra to be specific, some of the radio stations have known how to master social media to get the best from their audience. On Twitter, YFM for example has become master of hashtags and even sometimes to the absurd level. They know their audience and they know that getting them along would mean creating hashtags they can identify with. YFM joined in 2009 and has circa 187,000 followers on Twitter.
The closest rival to YFM, audience and programming wise, is Live FM, and since they came on the scene, they have indicated their penchant to playing in the social space with content directed at the people they call their audience and also have spurned very creative and relevant hashtags for the purpose (#MyDailyDoseOfVim for example). Live FM joined in 2013 and has about 20,300 followers.
Another youth targeted station that has been doing a lot of engagement with their audience on Twitter is Hitz FM. I remember from when Lexis Bill was on their morning show that they used to ask the audience to share their view on the programme and also to contribute to the relationship question of the day. With over 22,200 followers, they have a sizable number to engage.
Sunny FM has a little less than 1,500 followers on Twitter but it seems to be a very engaging account with those of its listeners who are on the microblogging site. Similarly, Pluzz FM, which has some 3,900 followers, is very active and interacts with its followers.
There are some stations which have no time for Twitter. Just like the Ghana Police Service Twitter account, the Atlantis Radio account has not tweeted since 2011, Radio Gold has not tweeted since 2013; Oman FM just recently started tweeting but it would be right for them to get someone who understands the language they choose to tweet in a bit more so he/she can do it better; Hot FM is nowhere on Twitter and so are many others.
Still focusing on Twitter (I find Twitter to be more interactive and a tad relevant to these kinds of engagements with audiences), one could conclude that the stations that find it most useful seems to be those which operate in the English speaking market. The local language ones hardly get involved in banter with their audience on that platform.
Take Peace FM for example, they have a Twitter handle which has almost 16,000 followers and it follows only four accounts (all of them foreign media or management consultancy organisations) and does nothing apart from tweeting news links and stories. It does no retweeting or any other form of engagement whatsoever.
Adom FM has less than 1,500 followers and it follows about 10 per cent of that. We could say that they try to get into some form of banter, but you realise that overwhelmingly, their tweets are to promote the late afternoon show with Jerry Justice than any of their other content.
In terms of numbers, the big boys on Twitter at the moment are Joy FM with 238,000+ followers and Citi FM with circa 188,000 followers. However, with these two bitter rivals, the competition is not so much in the numbers as in the engagement with audience and followers.
Citi FM has had a few aces on Joy FM especially when it comes to morning show and sports. Until recently when Joy FM Super Morning Show took Twitter a bit more serious and chose the right hashtags to define the conversations and thereby ensure that they trend, Citi FM was beating them black and blue.
Also on football match days, Citi FM used to over dominate the Twitter conversation like from Kathmandu and back. Although the station still dominate that side of the social media engagement, Joy FM has closed the gap tremendously. Citi’s dominance in football banter is maybe partly because of the right to run English Premier League commentary and also how its crack digital team positions to get the best from social media.
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I could be wrong on this, but let me hazard a guess that Joy FM’s closure on the Citi FM Twitter dominance regarding trending topics and conversation could be because they found the right antidote when former Citi FM Sports editor, Gary Al-Smith, crossed carpet to 355 Fanofaa Street. I could be wrong but the timing and coincidence is very striking.
Now let me go kamikaze. From my observation, over the last three months or so, if you were to draw a league table of the top trending morning show hashtags this is how it would look:
1. #CitiCBS - Citi FM
2. #RYSENSHYNE -
YFM
3. #JoySMS - Joy FM
4. #MorningStarr - Starr FM
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5. #LBC - Live FM
6. #DayBreakHitz - Hitz FM
So social media and especially Twitter is where the action is and all the stations that are serious about engaging their audience are finding it useful for many reasons including instant feedback. I have observed that Facebook is used mainly to push news and information and sometimes to gauge the view of listeners more than a tool to engage them.
Some of the stations are also on Instagram where photos from studios and events are shared with followers and some interaction elicited by those who take it seriously. Google+ is not very dominant but some have tried to use it. Citi FM has done some work with Google+ where they tried to run their premier league commentary in the early days when Al-Smith was fidgety with gadgets.
The telecom companies have keyed into this mindset as well and have varied mobile and broadband data packages that would ensure that listeners to radio and to a large extent viewers of television would interact with their hosts across social media and in so doing expend some of that data. Listeners are happy, radio stations are happy and telecom companies are happy. Everyone is happy!
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Besides, the stations call for interaction with the audience and following, the presenters also use their own accounts to ask for comments, views, questions and more on social media. That helps to deepen the interaction on social media, in my very arrogant opinion.