Yesterday, NBC News announced that msnbc.com would be transforming into the all-new NBCNews.com as the 16-year partnership between Microsoft and NBC came to an end. The New York Times details the divorce here and why it makes sense for both the 51% Comcast owned-NBC and for Microsoft who will look to launch it’s own news division shortly. But what will happen to the site’s social media accounts and how will social TV play a role in this new evolution of NBC News’ web presence? We spoke to NBC News Chief Digital Officer Vivian Schiller to get the answers.
The rebirth and separation of the websites will allow NBC News to take ownership over the large followings that the MSNBC.com social accounts have earned. “The good news is we’ll finally be able to aling the social media feeds with brands with the same name,” Schiller told Lost Remote. “As you probably know we’ve hand a strong connection to social media for a long time – we’re going to amp up – you’ll see a lot more social connectivity,” she added.
Interestingly, the msnbc and NBC News Twitter accounts have already been separate, just like the cable news network has been separate since it launched in 1996. But both @msnbc (230K followers) and @nbcnews (289K followers) had tweeted news coverage — now, @msnbc will focus on the cable network. The @msnbc account sent and pinned a tweet encouraging users who want to follow news updates to follow @nbcnews:
The Facebook pages however did go through the same change that msnbc.com did. “Facebook is probably the biggest social media change,” Schiller explained. “We’ve been working with them and they’ve been very helpful – we’re changing the MSNBC feed to NBC News and taking the followers with us,” she explained. “We’ll do that with [our] other social media as well.” Facebook.com/NBCNews now owns the fans of the previous Facebook page and a new Facebook.com/MSNBC page has debuted.
Schiller pointed us towards the site’s Technolog, which she described is already sporting “more frictionless sharing.” She added that they have “a lot of stuff in the works that were not ready to talk about,” when it comes to social that includes “sustainable integrated relationships with third parties” and the second screen. “We’re looking very deeply at the second screen, we believe it’s a huge piece of the future,” she described. “We want to super serve the audience with content that’s connected to the TV and integrate it with social.”