Social Media Strategy Review: CNN IBN

A part of the Network 18 group, CNN-IBN is one of the most popular English news channels in the country. The channel’s online operations are shared with its Hindi counterpart, IBN7 and all of their online branding is done as IBN-Live.

CNN IBN on Facebook

The news channel has over 1 million fans and a growth rate of 3.4%. The page has mostly a male dominated following and 90% of them are under the age of 30 years.

CNN-IBN and IBN7’s web wing comes under the media group’s website – IBNLive. The website which collates content from both the English and Hindi news channels, is the online identity for the channel’s processes.

Besides sharing news, the brand also engages with the audience by posing questions for discussions and polls. The channel is known and highly commended for their use of images. On an average, one update is made almost every one or two hours to maintain consistency as well as to ensure that the subscriber's news feed isn't unnecessarily clogged.

Another rather interesting strategy from the channel’s side has been to comment on articles on the website’s Facebook plugin, thereby sharing links on their own timeline. This is an extremely smart strategy, considering it maintains a discussion thread on both the places.

One part of the channel's strategy that should be noted is their use of Cover photos. The channel changed their cover photos 50 times within a period of 3 months. While that number is impressive, and shows that the channel has a Facebook revamp for several occasions, often it was seen that these pictures lacked any kind of context.

For instance, what was Ranbir Kapoor in the towel scene from Saawariya doing as a cover photo sometime in May? I fail to understand, and the lack of a photo description does not help matters. Leaving this aside, the channel’s excellent collection of images does add potential to the whole exercise.

The channel has a Pinterest application and that is pretty much the end of it. As a heads up, the Real Heroes app page hyperlinks you to a broken link instead of the show’s Facebook page. Perhaps, they need double checks in their processes.

CNN IBN on Twitter

On Twitter, the channel has over 5 lakh followers, which makes for a rather big community, which is growing at a rate of 10%.

The strategy, like any other news outlet, works on the tenets of providing news and breaking news. This is achieved by sharing links to articles, images, or text updates. Due to the media house's multiple Twitter, a lot of retweets are also seen. The fact that the channel’s Twitter handle also follows a lot of people is also note-worthy. This is in contrast to their competitor NDTV’s strategy which follows only its own accounts.

CNN-IBN’s Twitter strategy also links to the activity of the editors on the platform. The fact that Rajdeep Sardesai is one of the popular ‘Tweeples’ to follow does add weight to the channel’s strategy on the platform as well. Interestingly, the account also retweets the tweets of editors Sagarika Ghose and Rajdeep Sardesai.

It is also noteworthy that while NDTV has twice the followers as CNN-IBN, IBN tweets twice as much as NDTV. The channel does not make much use of or create hashtags. Even though it has a large following, there is no attempt to start a conversation or a debate on any topics through Twitter chats.

So, it can be summed up, that Social Media is being used as a mere website to post the activities of the channel.

CNN IBN on Google Plus

In an attempt to engage with the audience the channel also takes questions from the audience and conducts Hangouts with popular figures. This may be a clichéd activity, but it cannot be denied that it makes a good strategy.

CNN IBN on Pinterest

Finally, a channel that is actually active on Pinterest and has a variety of content. CNN-IBN or rather IBNlive.com’s Pinterest strategy is rather diverse with different boards for Sports, Entertainment, Tech, Politics and National news.

3-4 pins are made on a daily average, which happens to be a decent number for this sector.

These pins hyperlink to the articles/galleries on the Channel’s website.

One board, namely IBN videos, is one that is interesting, though not frequently updated. It is agreed that Pinterest is more of a visual medium than an audio-visual medium, but it should be taken into account that the channel has started something new, and updating video pins on the same is worth a try.

CNN IBN on YouTube

IBN Live, the channel on YouTube belongs to CNN IBN and has more than 52,000 subscribers. The channel is not pro active on the discussion forum. The videos too are a replica of the television episodes.

Conclusion

CNN IBN has a huge community size on various platforms, but needs to get more innovative with campaigns. There is a lot of creative scope on Social Media, and news channel like CNN IBN should use it to engage and interact with its viewers.