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<font color="#C1D35D">Facebook</font></br></br> | <font color="#C1D35D">Facebook</font></br></br> | ||
Revision as of 21:53, 30 October 2017
Social Media
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.