Al Jazeera America is an American news channel reporting unbiased, fact-based and in-depth journalism that gets you closer to the people at the heart of the news. In less than one year, our Twitter feed, @AJAM, has become a prime news destination with a loyal and engaged fan base. Al Jazeera America’s Twitter feed, @AJAM, has become a key destination for seeking timely news updates. In just five months, @AJAM’s follower base has grown over 275%. Our Twitter account features the same high quality of journalism our audience has come to expect from us on air and other digital platforms. This focus on facts over opinion has helped us stand out from competitors and become a leader in the news space in a very short time. The news is truly the star here.
To introduce the Al Jazeera America brand to U.S. news consumers, we provided early followers an unprecedented look behind-the-scenes as we built our channel from the ground up. Photos, live tweets from events, and an in-depth series of blogs profiling our diverse set of employees all helped generate excitement for our August 20, 2013 launch. During this time, we hosted virtual pitch meetings with the teams behind two of our shows to give fans a preview of the content we were working on and to encourage our audience to comment and share their opinions.
By the time Al Jazeera America formally launched on August 20, 2013, we had already grown our Twitter community to over 43,000 followers.
Now that the channel has launched, we use a variety of means to engage followers on Twitter from timely news updates to user polls and hashtag campaigns. Our fan base has a broad set of interests and we work hard to post stories that relate to them. Additionally, we connect and share updates from our various shows to keep the audience informed about what is happening on-air.
A recent example of Al Jazeera America’s influence on Twitter was our State of the Union hashtag campaign. On the Thursday before the SOTU, we launched the #DearPOTUS hashtag with a blog post and multiple tweets. The posts showed people previously featured on our flagship show, America Tonight, holding up signs that began “Dear Mr. President, I want…" followed by the number one issue they wanted the president to take on. We then invited our digital audience to tweet or email their own photos with the hashtag #DearPOTUS. We also reached out to diverse activist groups to help get the word out.
The tweets, pictures, and comments that followed covered a wide range of issues, providing a powerful insight into what our audience genuinely cares about. During the six days that the campaign ran, from January 22nd through the 28th, our hashtag was tweeted 2,171 times, peaking the Sunday before the State of the Union and continuing at a high volume through the day of the address. According to Topsy, the campaign garnered 12.7MM potential impressions.
@AJAM has earned the respect of influencers in the social space with followers including Glenn Greenwald, Evan Rachel Wood, and Russell Simmons, to name a few and has become a top news outlet on Twitter. Itself an influential news source in fans’ feeds, @AJAM has a Klout score of 81.
https://twitter.com/ajam http://www.aljazeera.com
