Spread the news: BBC takes to popular messaging app Line

The BBC has just started using the popular messaging app Line to share news.

The British broadcaster now has an official account on Line in 11 countries – the US, Australia, Spain, Germany, Italy, India, France, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong. With this, the BBC is sharing a mix of headlined images and very short video clips overlaid with captions to its followers. It looks like this:

First announced earlier this week by the Japan-based messaging app, the BBC account – which can be found at @BBCnews – now has 83,000 followers. That could grow further, as the international account is available to a sizable proportion of the app’s near half a billion registered users.

See: Line releases regional breakdowns for its 490 million registered users

The only downside is that, for now, all of this is available only in English. But the BBC has news services in other languages that could possibly be included at a later date.

This comes about five months after the BBC experimented with WeChat and WhatsApp in India to deliver news ahead of the country’s national election.

Akira Morikawa, the CEO of LINE Corporation, said in this week’s announcement that the BBC public account is “just the beginning of further expansion to the infrastructure of the global services we provide.”

China’s WeChat has led the way in being a portal for media outlets, brands, and celebrities to reach out to people in the same manner that broader social networks like Facebook and Twitter have done. Line seems to be going down a similar path, perhaps hoping to be an alternative to Facebook and Twitter for media organizations.