By Doris Obinna
One of Nigeria’s telecom service providers, 9mobile, has reaffirmed its support for the Nigerian news media by facilitating various avenues for journalists to upskill in developing creative news content to expand their audience footprint.
The telecom company gave the assurance during the sixth edition of its media capacity building workshop with the theme “Leveraging video content to reach new audiences.”
Speaking during the session, the executive director, regulatory and corporate affairs, 9mobile, Abdulrahman Ado, represented by the public relations lead, 9mobile, Chineze Amanfo, remarked that it was extremely important for journalists to be in tune with latest trends that will help them attract wider news consuming audiences to their contents.
She said, “At 9mobile, we appreciate the efforts by journalists in ensuring that members of the public constantly get up-to-date information about happenings within and around the country.
This training became necessary to help our media partners gain new insights on content leveraging that guarantees qualitymedia traction.”
In addition, she noted that with the advent and growth of citizen journalism fueled by digital technology, it has become imperative for journalists to build digital reporting skills. “We encourage today’s participants to take advantage of the training, leverage the use of video contents and, most importantly, continuously seek innovative ways to scale their reporting skills,” she stated.
The session, which was facilitated by renowned digital content creator, Tobi Ayeni (MissTechy), had in attendance journalists from both print and online news platforms. In her opening remarks, Ayeni defined content leveraging “as the ability to use content in multiple ways to get the highest return on engagement from each piece of content created.”
According to her, as a content creator, it is vital to keep the consumer/audience in focus during the entire process of content creation. She emphasized that video contents offer a better chance of attracting new audiences. Backing up her claims, she highlighted that, “45 per cent of people watch more than an hour of Facebook or YouTube videos a week, while 72 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds and 92 per cent of mobile video viewers share videos with others.”
Consequently, Ayeni noted that based on the statistics available, video content is uniqueand attracts more engagement which is important for publishers seeking to appeal to wider audiences and gain loyalty.
She identified various video types as including live action video, talking head videos, interview videos and animated/text overlay videos, which can all be used specifically, depending on what the content creator is seeking to achieve.