Determined to widen its reach, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has
announced a partnership with BlackBerry
to deliver news from its Hausa service to its users in Nigeria, offering five
BBC Hausa news alerts daily via BlackBerry
Messenger (BBM).
The new service is part of BBC’s move to use chat apps to
deliver its content to, and engage with, a wider demography of users. Each
alert contains story links subscribers can share, along with their comments and
story ideas.
Trushar Barot,
assistant editor for the Social Media Hub at BBC News, 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.”
BBC Hausa editor, Mansur
Liman said: “With over 96 per cent of
the traffic to the bbchausa.com website coming to its mobile version, BBC Hausa
has prioritized its mobile offer as our key platform to reach our audiences.
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.”
To subscribe, individuals are required to download the
latest version of BBM available on iOS, Android and BlackBerry smartphones, and
search for ‘BBC Hausa’ from the ‘Channels’ tab.
They can also connect via the BBM PIN: C00334DDD. Links to
the BBC Hausa BBM channel will also be available via bbchausa.com and
BBM.com/bbchausa.
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