Executive summary

The BBC is the world’s leading public service broadcaster and BBC News is one of its primary services, reaching over 300 million people weekly. BBC News’ success is strongly tied to the brand’s digital presence. Although BBC News captured the interest of audiences across many channels, the brand also aimed to increase website visits. Their strategy? Implementing Khoros software to use social data for the first time to monitor UK election trends and provide more engaging content that would lead to increased social referrals to the BBC News website.

Before using the Khoros platform, BBC News lacked the means to track how their content was performing on social media and couldn’t adapt their coverage for the channel accordingly. When the UK’s 56th General Election took place, for the first time in UK election history, BBC News used social data to monitor election trends, candidates, and influencers. The brand created an Election Hub to track the top terms and hashtags used in debates and throughout the election. With unlimited access to real-time social insights, BBC News was also able to quickly fuse social statistics into their coverage—leading to more engaging content and an increase in web traffic.

As a result of utilizing Khoros to monitor their content and adapt their strategy on social media, BBC News delivered more engaging content during the election, increasing their Twitter impressions by 340% over average and social referrals to their website by 50%. Today, BBC News continues to leverage the Khoros platform so the brand can spread relevant and engaging news around the world.

“Khoros is advantageous in that it allows us to pull data quickly into a simple summarised form.”

— Mark Frankel
Assistant Editor, UGC and Social News, BBC