Difference between revisions of "Team:Dalhousie/SocialMedia"

Goal

As science communication is our major human practises theme, we wanted to become better social media science communicators. In previous years we had resorted to primarily using one media platform to engage with the community. This year we expanded our reach and established a media presence on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The goal for our social media was to create a two-directional communication channel between the public and ourselves. We tried not to focus solely on ourselves (although our project, our team and iGEM were the focus of many tweets and posts), and instead tried to captivate a diverse audience including those well-versed in scientific research, and those just entering the field. Therefore, we made sure to vary the content of our posts and tweets to include relevant news articles, current debates in science, artful depictions of science topics, etc. Furthermore, we followed many prominent science communicators to gain inspiration.

Results

Facebook

Since the start of the summer we managed to double our number of followers. Our reach fluctuated depending on the content of our posts. The posts that had the greatest reach typically involved student profiles or project updates.





The massive spike on July 30 th , for instance, was a post highlighting our wet lab team lead Jacob (popular guy!). Our fundraising posts reached the least amount of people. The majority of our followers were women between the ages 16-24 from Canada.














Instagram
We were not able to do the same statistics on our Instagram account as we were able to do with Facebook and Twitter, however, we were able to collect some data. As of right now, the account has 149 followers and a post on average gets 20+ likes.

Twitter
Since the start of this iGEM season our twitter impressions have greatly increased from around two thousand in May to over 11 thousand in September. Similar to Facebook, the posts that engaged the public the most typically involved our team members, our research, or our human practises efforts. Our current following is 322 with the most prevalent age being between 18-24. Interesting, in contrast to our Facebook group, the majority of our followers are male.

Evaluation

Our analysis emphasizes that while we have increased our social media presence, there are certainly still areas in need of improvement. One way we used our different social media platforms effectively was to highlight team members in our “spotlight Sundays” tweets and posts. We reached our widest and most diverse audiences in these updates. This year our team became more diverse with students from faculties such as computer science, neuroscience, biochemistry, and microbiology. In the future, however, we hope to engage even more students from departments such as engineering and design. We believe that these spotlight Sunday tweets and posts may help us recruit a more diverse team in the future.
An area that we would like to improve is engaging with people over the age of 35 as this is a group that is underrepresented on all of our social media platforms. Many of our viewers are our friends and family thus it makes sense that our audience is fairly young. Attempting to engage members of the public outside of our immediate circles will in no doubt enrich the discussions and debates we hope to foster on our platforms.