The Science People See on Social Media (Pew Research Center)
Most science-related Facebook pages focus their content on one or two subject areas. Topics like health and medicine were the most common, with other subjects like Animal sciences and Astronomy/Physics being frequented as well.
Multiplatform pages tend to be hosted by larger groups/companies, allowing them to rely heavily on their own content sources. A few of the smaller Facebook-primary pages served as aggregators which mostly share content published by other organizations that the pages themselves did not produce.
There were mainly three different types of content produced by the 30 studied Facebook pages, with each of them usually focusing on one of them. These three were news on new scientific discoveries and developments, already known scientific information that could be applied and used by the audience, and promotional material for media programs on other platforms.
The posts on these pages that were about funding for scientific research tended to get more interactions for users, however this data is likely to be slightly biased as there were significant decreases in scientific funding being discussed at the time when this data was being collected.
Posts that mention “Calls to Action” (such as posts that directly say “Share this if you ___”) and posts that were mostly if not only visual were very popular. (I personally believe that these would have been the most common if not for the biased data mentioned in [4])
Communicating Science Online (AAAS)
About two thirds of American adults use at least one form of social media, and approximately 75% of adults worldwide who use the internet use social media.
From 2006 to 2014, the amount of people who used the internet to find information about scientific new increased from about 20% to over 47%, which was a notable increases in comparison to other sources.
Different platforms that you post your scientific findings online can have different effects on who will read it and how they will read it. A normal website is good for distributing detailed information but is difficult to interact with your viewers with. A blog is more informal, but will allow you to better communicate with people. Social media makes it easy to interact with a wide range of the public in near-real-time communication.
Even individual social media platforms can impact how you reach the public. Facebook is good for branding, Twitter is good for conversational purposes, YouTube is the best for explaining information through videos, etc.
It is important for scientists to form relationships and build networks on their social media because this can help them better communicate their information to larger audiences.
Part 2 – Following an influencer
What is the name of the organization?
NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Facebook
How many followers do they have?
25,932,412 people
When was this account created?
April 9, 2009
Who runs the social media for this account? (Check their website)
John Yembrick is NASA’s social media manager.
Using “The Science People See on Social Media” Article (p.3), what types of social media posts are they sharing? Which ones do you notice are getting more engagement (likes, comments, shares)?
A majority of the current posts seem to be on New Discoveries and Explanations of Concepts, although there are a few promotions for their livestreams and other social media platforms.
Most of these posts are getting around one thousand likes, but a few can get as high as five thousand, but there does not seem to be a significant pattern in certain categories getting only higher counts.
What are some things that are innovative about their account?
They seem to be using Facebook’s new livestreaming feature frequently.
What could they be doing better, based on the readings from this week?
What they are doing seems to be working based on the information from our readings. Lots of images and videos are present, and most of the posts recommend sharing the posts they make to others.