The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) announced its partnership with BlackBerry to deliver news from its Hausa service to its users in Nigeria, offering five BBC Hausa news alerts daily through Blackberry Messenger (BBM). This new move is part of BBC’s attempt to use chat apps to pass its content to and engage a wider demography of users.
In each alert subscribers receive are story links they can share along with their comments and their story ideas.
Assistant editor for Social Media Hub, BBC News, Trushar Barot said, “We had been speaking to Blackberry for a few months about their plans to develop their BBM product. We were keen to try and find a BBC service that we felt would be a good fit to test the service. Many Nigerians use BBM, with consumption of news content on mobile phones also very high, so linking up with the BBC Hausa service felt like the right choice.”
Mansur Liman, BBC Hausa editor said, “With over 96% of the traffic to bbchausa.com website coming to its mobile version, BBC Hausa has prioritized its mobile offer as our key platform to reach our audiences.” He continued, “The launch of the BBC Hausa BBM in Nigeria – our biggest market – is a great development which will allow us to tap into new audiences, and also create a very simple, cheap and immediate way of connecting us with our users there.”
Individuals can subscribe by downloading the latest version of the BBM available on iOS, Andriod and BlackBerry smartphones and search for BBC Hausa from the Channels tab. They can also connect via the BBM Pin: C00334DDD. Links to add the BBC Hausa from the BBM channel will be made available also on bbchausa.com and BBM.com/bbchausa.
