MUMBAI: Twitter, the microblogging site, is seeking to put itself at the heart of the content strategies of India's broadcasters, a leading executive has said.

"There is a content play which can happen in a very big way on Twitter beyond just marketing," Viral Jani, head/television strategy & partnerships at Twitter India, told Exchange4Media,

He observed that there had been a surge in hashtag conversations since English-language news channels had begun giving a hashtag to each news story.

"It is almost like integrating at a DNA level," he said. "That is the real magic and that is something that we want to replicate across the board."

In fact, Twitter is aiming to establish an interdependent relationship with broadcasters. "We want Twitter to be the core of their content strategy when creating their shows," Jani explained.

"We have seen that a lot of shows that have benefitted from Twitter in India and globally and we believe that there is a huge appetite in India and probably in the next few months we will see a lot of interaction around this," he added.

This period coincides with a rush of reality TV shows, an area where Jani saw "huge scope" and promised "deep level engagement on Twitter".

He also revealed that the social networking site was looking to leverage its video-streaming app.

"We will see some very interesting Periscope integrations coming up in a couple of weeks from now," he said. "I can't reveal names right now but there are some big-ticket celebrities that we want to bring in on Periscope and some interesting buzz around that."

Some broadcasters are already using Periscope to engage with audiences for their shows: viewers of CNN IBN and IBN7, for example, can engage in real-time with anchors and journalists this way.

The reason for a closer relationship with broadcasters is, of course, financial. "My main objective is to get great content on Twitter and advertising will follow after that," said Jani.

Data sourced from Exchange4Media; additional content by Warc staff