BBC News joins a growing list of news organizations that are shifting from automatically-updated Twitter feeds to human-powered tweets. “We want to be tweeting with value,” explains Chris Hamilton, BBC News’ social media editor. “Are we exposing our best content, and also tweeting intelligently?”
While @BBCBreaking has been human-powered for some time, the BBC is updating @BBCNews and (soon) @BBCWorld by hand instead of automatically tweeting out headlines as stories are posted, reports NiemanLab. Recently, the NYTimes also made the switch on its main account as an experiment (it appears that account is now partly-automated with occasional human intervention.)
The BBC has borrowed the same social media guideline from NYTimes: “Don’t do anything stupid,” which is probably the best possible guideline in a rapidly-evolving space that’s difficult to neatly segment into newsroom rules.
Of course, switching from automated to human-powered accounts requires, well, humans. And while just about everyone agrees that the human touch is much more effective — Twitter and Facebook are two-way communication platforms — dedicating resources against it in today’s economy is always a struggle. But in the end, it boils down to priorities, and the BBC is putting its money on social.