How can a radio station be social?

There is an old adage in our business that ‘radio is the original social media’.

Whether that is true or not it is surprising, in todays world of consolidated radio brands, that only one radio brand was featured in the Social Brands 100 list, released this week.

Global Radio’s Capital FM appeared 27th in the one hundred list ahead of other major media and entertainment brands including MTV, BBC, Blackberry and Penguin.

The Social Brands 100, created by social agency Headstream, was whittled down from a crowd-sourced list of top brands, then scored by social-media monitoring firm Brandwatch and a panel of industry judges.

Capital’s audience is tech-savvy urbanites who involve the social web in their everyday communication.

With over 735,000 Facebook fan likes and nearly a quarter of a million Twitter followers they’re obviously doing something right.

Capital regularly appears in UK-wide trending topics and brings social media into the heart of its output, especially during evening programming and artist webchats.

Social media also forms part of key station promotions for their major multi-artist events including, most recently, the ‘Take your Seats, Make Some noise’ campaign.

Absolute Radio

Another great recent example of a radio station utilising social media effectively is Absolute Radio.

Absolute has expolited the power of a ‘celebrity retweet’ – engaging Ian Wright’s fans to help spread the word about new England match commentary on the station.

The station created a viral video which was retweeeted by popular Twitter celebrities including @jkcorden (James Corden), @piersmorgan (popular? Ed.) and @Lord_Sugar, creating an additional potentional audience of over 6.7 million punters worldwide exposed to the Absolute Radio brand.

So whether you measure trends, retweets or another metric, it’s time to think .. “are you doing great things with your radio station brand within the social place?”

Please do share your successes and your thoughts by emailing jonathan@earshotcreative.com