Mark Frankel, BBC

I'm Mark Frankel, I'm Social Media Editor for BBC News. That means that I work at the BBC, based in London. I look after the main BBC News social media channels on Twitter, on Facebook, on Instagram, Snapchat, and I'm also responsible with senior colleagues at the BBC for BBC's social media strategy in news. I think at the outset, the thing that I'm most passionate about is the opportunity to reach audiences that wouldn't naturally come to BBC News. Often younger audiences, often more diverse audiences, different socioeconomic backgrounds, people who are not high news consumers but might be fascinated by news if it was presented to them in a different way and appeared in their news feed on a mobile device. So there are opportunities for us in expanding our audiences. We're very fortunate at the BBC. We have large audiences across the world. People know us. People are aware of our brand. But I think sometimes the brand has less recognition with younger audiences and specifically on an international perspective where the market is more disrupted, where content is more distributed, the BBC's brand is less well known. So social media presents itself to us as a huge opportunity to engage those audiences in spaces they already inhabit and drive them into our storytelling, into the best of our journalism and get them to explore more of our great content. Probably the biggest challenge is how to ensure that the audience then see your content in those spaces, recognise it as your content and then want to seek more of it by returning to your television and radio programmes or coming to your website. I think the thing that we need to be mindful of is as we distribute more content internationally and on social media, it goes out there and doesn't always return back to us, if that makes sense. So essentially there are people who are snacking on it, consuming it, sharing it with their friends, their family, their colleagues. Do they know that it's BBC content? Do they know that there's more out there for them if only they explored it at their leisure on our own platforms? I think Facebook Live is a good example of this. It's an expanding area in social media, live streaming, Periscope, Facebook, we've seen it in other places previously as well. I think where the BBC has an inbuilt advantage is that we are broadcasters, we're good at broadcasters, we've done it for many years, but what we want to do is use a platform like Facebook or Twitter or Periscope and use those platforms to our advantage so that people don't just see the content there but want to explore more of BBC television and radio programmes as well. So they don't just see it as an off-platform experience in a third-party space that benefits the third party but doesn't benefit the BBC. What are the challenges of the BBC? Well I think it's largely getting increasingly noisy, increasingly distributed and increasingly disruptive and by that I suppose I mean that as traditional broadcasters are challenged to produce more content in spaces that they haven't naturally inhabited or they don't have a purchase power with those audiences in the first place, there is a kind of push and pull that's going on. We have existing loyalty and trust and brand awareness but we need to try and build that brand awareness in a different space and I think the challenge for the future will be how far that goes, how disruptive it becomes, how noisy. We've already seen lots of evidence that people enjoy seeing content where they choose to be but they're also mindful of the fakery, the half-truths, the rumour mill and they want a trusted guide and I think what traditional broadcasters can help with, like the BBC, is help those audiences guide their way through this noisy and often very challenging environment where there's a cacophony of things happening but what you really need is somebody to hold your hand and say that's what you want to look at, this is what you want to watch, this is what you want to read. So I think there's still a place for traditional broadcasters and publishers but it's how far they're going to have the chance to direct it.