What We Learned Launching A Branded Live Chat Community For A TV Show
We’ve completed our first branded community for the Belgian national public broadcaster, VRT. Here are some of the things we learned.
Some Background Info
- Pano is a weekly investigative TV magazine about important topics to society. It has about 500k viewers every week, 50k followers on Facebook and about half of that on Twitter. These are their main communication tools. They have no dedicated community manager and are somewhat dependent on the overall news service VRT NWS.
- We created a branded community on their own domain with a live chat for every episode.
#1 Live Chat Generates 10x More Engagement
We launched the community at the start of the new season. It was quiet, very quiet … [crickets]. We thought we had done something wrong. Maybe the world does not need another community? BOOM!! a few minutes after the first episode, hundreds of messages were coming in. 10 weeks in, we came to the conclusion that this community was more engaged than Pano’s Facebook and Twitter combined. Measured by the number of messages, close to 10x more engaged.
#2 When The Community Feels Alive
People understood that this was live right now, almost synchronous. The community formed around specific timings like the release of a new topic, or the end of an episode. At those times, the feeling of belonging was tremendous. The episodes that had a smaller number of active users, actually had a bigger return in terms of quality. People wished each other good night, sleep tight.
#3 What Are We Talking About ?
For somebody jumping in the conversation, it takes some time to get acquainted with the current topic. We’ve come up with a two potential solutions for this.
- Topic detection on a room level: this gives people an immediate overview of the subjects being discussed
- Threads-to-rooms: this automatically creates a new room for threads with a certain volume.
#4 Immediate Feedback
People know they are contributing something to your brand. While you can say anything about anyone on existing social platforms, a branded environment somehow feels like you’re in somebody’s house. You’re a little careful about what you say about them. This was counter balanced with allowing people to register pseudonymously. This resulted in motivated and constructive feedback about every episode.
#5 No Moderation Without Explanation
Moderating a community happened in 2 ways. We built a bot that prevented people from posting spam and stuff that was definitely not ok. We manually moderated personal attacks on people. Even though you’ve got this policy written down and published in the community, every time you moderate, you have to be prepared to explain your action immediately. This actually creates understanding and a feeling of safety in your community.
Questions We Got
Why Not Create A Slack Team or a Discord Server?
Our community is built as a web app. This guarantees everybody with a somewhat up-to-date browser can access it. We skipped the download and invite process this way.
The number of users and messages would drive up the cost of running a public community beyond something reasonable, if you would go with Slack.
Having the flexibility to run a short term live chat that you can pause was a big plus to the Pano team.
Why Not Create A Facebook Group?
Facebook does not have the ability to create multiple chat rooms, one for each episode in our case.
We allow pseudonymous access to the chat. This worked well for a show that drives on controversial themes.
About How We Got There
We got in contact with VRT Sandbox. This is a dedicated corporate innovation division within VRT. They have helped us confirm interest within the group and get to the right people fast. Top notch!
When we started the project we only had a few weeks until the new season came on. We asked Mono for help with our frontend. Outstanding work!
Want to learn more about our communities? Get in touch with us here.
