Yesterday we caught up with Ben Ayers, ITV.com’s Social Media Manager to talk about the unique challenges a broadcaster has in managing a digital profile, as well as his view on growth areas within social media.

The first of these is the two screen phenomenon (watching a television show while at your laptop, conversing online), which Ayers is watching with interest. “The changes that Facebook are making next year will allow us to have a closer relationship with fans. The developments centre around the Open Graph API, which is really the next iteration of Facebook Connect and will apparently allow our own site to become an extension of our fan pages.”

ITV.com have put a lot of work into its programme-based fan pages of late, with the I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here Page gaining 100,000 fans in just a week and a half. As Ayers points out, not many brands have the reach to be able to do that in such a short space of time. “We’re lucky in TV, we can make an immediate connection and we’re good at making it obvious where people can connect with us,” he added.

A lot of ITV’s focus for the future of their work with social media is creating an integrated and deeper experience for viewers, making programme sites more relevant. We talked about how the channel goes about making decisions on where to direct efforts in this area.

Ayers and his team have already highlighted Facebook and Twitter as key areas of growth, because they’re scalable. He said that it was about listening to what’s being said about ITV’s shows, and then going to those places to find people and draw them into a more permanent relationship.

“People attach themselves to a programme on something like Facebook, it’s like wearing a badge. I think this then gives us some permission to engage with them in the same way. We haven’t fully learnt how do that yet; the frequency or how to answer the questions we get asked. But we’re learning,” Ayers added.

He also noted that it wasn’t just a one-way street. ITV takes the opinions of its programmes’ fans and plugs them directly into the shows for a response. “There’s nothing worse than shouting into the ether and no-one listening!”

Continuing the conversation about finding those fans, we wondered if Ayers used a monitoring service to do this, or relied on other methods? “Sentiment analysis is nowhere near where it could be at the moment, but I actually think it’s the next phase for Twitter. You’ll be able to look for positive or negative mentions of a brand. Right now, the site pretty much owns real time, so it’s easy to search, but easy to obsess about at the same time.”

We also talked strategy, and balancing the needs of various programmes while some – like the X Factor – are obviously much more prominent than others. “We actually have a dedicated member of the Fremantle team who works on X Factor, and for I’m A Celeb we work with one of the producers in the jungle. It’s the web and operations team on This Morning. In fact, Gary (ITV.com’s Communities Assistant) and I are more like air traffic controllers than anything else.”

He spoke about the strategy he employs, which is to train people closest to the action. “I don’t think it’s ideal for social media to be exclusively handled by PR or communications people. You need people close to the content and the stories and these are often producers, website editors and so on. Gary and I manage these spaces but we can’t be pretending that we’re the ones in the jungle. We are transparent and say that we’ll feed questions in. Also, when it comes to shows like I’m A Celebrity we share access to Twitter and Facebook with production. Increasingly, we’re acting like gate keepers, plugging the right people in the business into these streams. I’m always wary of agencies that say they’ll Twitter on your behalf, it really needs to be in-house – though sometimes you can find a happy balance.”