How Wayin Empowered Audiences’ Voices for India Election Coverage

By Adam Flomenbaum 

TV-monitor_timesnowgraphThe results of India’s 16th general elections were announced last week, and the BJP’s Narendra Modi will be India’s 14th prime minister.

Times Now – India’s most watched channel – provided voters with non-stop election coverage and the network used Wayin Broadcast to integrate viewer tweets directly into telecasts. Wayin Broadcast gives TV producers real-time social information about how audiences are engaging with shows, and allows them to display the conversation on-air.

Using Wayin, Times Now prompted viewers with specific hashtags, allowing them to ask questions directly to the party representatives. Last Thursday, Times Now also utilized a Wayin-powered Twitter heat map, showing where the election conversation was taking place. Since the integration commenced in early April, Time Now gained more than 100,000 Twitter followers.

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For more on how Wayin helped Times Now cover the election, we spoke with Tim Glomb, VP of Media & Entertainment at Wayin.

Lost Remote: What did the engagement numbers look like?

Tim Glomb: 56 million tweets from Jan through the election on related topics.  Times Now was the fastest growing news broadcaster on Twitter during the elections increasing nearly 200,000 followers in just under two months.  Times Now also created hashtags daily inside their live coverage resulting in several global trends and tens of millions of impressions.  #MegaExitPoll saw 15 mil impressions alone.  This attributed to record ratings and a 47% share of viewership in election week, over double the number two network!

LR: How powerful can social be in educating voters?

Glomb: In the 2009 elections, just one politician had a mere 6,000 followers.  Through this election the candidates’ followers tally in the millions. @NarendraModi has reached 3.97 million followers alone.  Twitter became an incredibly powerful tool in sharing information on the candidates and the key issues. With Wayin, Times Now was able to bring the voice of the audience into live debates broadcast across the nation.   Real time twitter polls and tweet counters forced the candidates to discuss issues that were fueled by the voting public.

LR: How has Time Now been able to seamlessly integrate Wayin into broadcasts?

Glomb: Wayin Broadcast is a powerful tool that gives the producers instant access to all relevant tweets around the election.  It also surfaces up trending terms inside the election topics themselves for a deeper understanding of what really matters to the voters. It’s easy to identify topics bubbling up from the audience and just as easy to get them into the broadcast production workflow.  Wayin’s API delivers the right content to the right visual allowing Times Now to create ground breaking graphics and ultimately set a new bar for how a news story can be presented.

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