SBS is moving towards a more personalised social media experience through developing a Chinese language project that utilises online communities.
SBS online technical director, Matt Costain, said SBS had a strong history of forming online communities, and this would only increase with the new social media project.
“We have really big communities," he said. "The World Game community has around 70,000 users and on Facebook we have around 50,000 group members which is pretty significant.
“Where that’s headed for us, is we’re looking at delivering a more personalised experience for the user. We have a project scheduled to be released at the end of this year that’s targeting a Chinese language group, and this is an incredibly social project.”
Costain said the network is looking at avenues to create greater authenticity in its use of social media.
“We’ve had the production groups for each of the websites or TV programs manage their own communities, and that’s still generally the case because this is maintaining the levels of authenticity around the social media space,” he said.
Costain said each program at SBS generally had a Facebook and Twitter presence, but bringing users back to SBS’ website was becoming an issue for the organisation.
"We find the problem with Facebook and Twitter is that the conversation moves away from our website," he said. "It comes down to the issue of do you fish where the big fish are, or bring them back over to the site itself?."
Costain also shared insights into SBS online’s move to the cloud, saying this was important to the network’s success in covering the recent World Cup.
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