BBC Blogs - College of Journalism - How BBC News covered Indian elections on WhatsApp and WeChat

On WhatsApp we set up a BBC News account and invited users to add a mobile number to their WhatsApp contacts and send a message to it to subscribe to the service. Users were then put on to a ‘broadcast list’ where they would receive a maximum of three updates a day, in both Hindi and English.

In addition to WhatsApp, we had set up a BBC News India channel on WeChat. This was limited to one update a day, where users would get a bundled set of headlines and stories that they could click through to, eventually taking them back to our News website if they wanted to read about the story in more depth:

way from the Indian elections, we have been running an ongoing pilot with our BBC Hausa service on Blackberry’s BBM platform. A BBC Hausa account on the platform’s new ‘channels’ tab posts news stories to subscribers. The content is deliberately simpler in format, with a sentence of text and a link to the full story, to take into account the limited data allowance that many Nigerians have.