Tweeting the Budget: a BBC hashtag experiment

Anyone who followed Budget Day on Twitter may have noticed the BBC trying something a bit different. As an experiment, we used the hashtag #BBCBudget to aggregate the best of our content on the story and engage with our audience.

It was something that wasn't welcomed by all and I can understand the concern that the BBC may have appeared to be trying to counter other hashtags already in use to talk about the Budget on Twitter. There was an interesting debate about the benefits or pitfalls of us using this method.

It's probably useful to provide some context. A year ago, BBC News didn't have any correspondents or reporters who were tweeting officially - apart from Laura Kuenssberg - and only a couple of news programmes with any official presence on the platform. We were using the @BBC_haveyoursay account to try to gauge audience sentiment and feed it into BBC News output. It was a useful means of tapping into the real-time conversation, but it felt a bit removed from being able to engage more directly with those who were tweeting.

During the election campaign, we experimented with having a central BBCElection Twitter account - where we tried to share the best content from all of the BBC's output. 

Fast-forward a year and things have moved on. The likes of Robert Peston, Stephanie Flanders and Hugh Pym have all started tweeting, providing expert analysis on the latest stories on their patch. Our main BBCBreaking and BBCNews accounts had doubled their number of followers, and programmes like BBC Breakfast and the Daily Politics have established a firm presence too. 

So it seemed to be the right time to test out a different approach - where, rather than trying to tweet from one account, we made sure that all accounts tweeting on the Budget used a common hashtag - #BBCBudget (left), so that anyone who wanted to find the best BBC content could do so in one place. This is something other bits of the BBC have already been using to good effect around their live coverage. So BBC Sport has #BBCF1 on Formula One, or #BBCFootball for popular football online live text commentaries.

#BBCBudget didn't stop at the main correspondent and programme accounts: BBC Local Radio also added a fresh perspective, and regional correspondents ensured the impact of the Budget was reflected at that level as well. 

But we didn't want to keep all this on Twitter: we wanted to ensure that the best of the conversations were fed back into mainstream BBC output too. 

So one of our producers fed in the audience reaction from the @BBC_HaveYourSay account to our presenter Anita Anand, who was broadcasting from Hull into our main Budget programme on BBC2. And news correspondent Sangita Myska did a great job of feeding this content into news slots on the BBC News Channel. 

At time of writing, we're still going through some of the questions and issues that people talked about through the hashtag, so that we can put them to experts on the News Channel later and for a Q&A piece on the BBC News website.

But I'd say the key beneficiary of the hashtag experiment has been the Live Event Page on the BBC News website. One of our producers who was responsible for ensuring the best tweets went onto the page told me that having a dedicated BBC hashtag had made a huge difference editorially. Since the audience was proactively using the hashtag, it was easier for us to republish those tweets on the website, as their writers had made the choice to engage with us. It felt much more comfortable editorially than just taking tweets without someone's permission - even if Twitter's terms may allow us to do that.

I'd also like to think that we did a little public service in reaching out to a broader audience about the value of using hashtags on Twitter. Research shows that the vast majority of people never use a hashtag when talking about a subject. I hope the fact that our hashtag was promoted so consistently across the BBC during the day means more people have discovered what hashtags are and may use them in the future.

The experiment has given us plenty of food for thought. I'm sure that, by the time the next Budget comes along, there will be other ways we can work on the story, on Twitter and across social media more broadly.

Trushar Barot is Assistant Editor at the User Generated Content and Social Media hub in the BBC Newsroom.