Hello!
For my first blog post, I wanted to share five things I learned from two articles that I read this week about science in social media, as well as talk about a scientist in my field of interest named John Z. Kiss.
Five things learned from The Science People See on Social Media
- The top 30 most popular scientific pages on Facebook have at least 3 million followers, with the most followed page National Geographic having 44.3 million followers. This means there is a large amount of people interested in science.
- From 2014 to 2017, the 15 multiplatform pages increased the production of posts by 115% from 37,000 to 79,000 and the 15 Facebook-primary pages increased their production by 66% from 31,000 to 52,000. This shows the pages increase in posts to satisfy the growing curiosity of science from consumers.
- While more adults use Facebook than Twitter, a few pages are more active on Twitter. For example, Neil DeGrasse Tyson had about 11.4 million followers on Twitter compared to his 4 million on Facebook, and tweeted 393 times in 2017 compared to the 130 Facebook posts in 2017.
- Science stories that cause public division did not appear often in the major Facebook science pages, such as the use of GMOs which only accumulated 1% of posts about food and nutrition.
- Most Facebook pages have a single frame for their stories. This means there is only one main focus to the story.
Five things I learned from Communicating Science Online
- A scientists word on social media such as Twitter, like in the publishing world, is only as good as his credibility. In order to establish that credibility, most scientists assert their credibility by linking their institutions with their profiles in order to let people know that they are a credible source.
- It is important to choose the right platform for your work. When conveying the information, platforms such as Twitter offer only a set amount of characters and is built on mostly interaction with people while a blog could be less personal and be as long as the author seems fit.
- The ability to share content online has created a way for different people to network in a way they might not have necessarily known by posting their work online for like-minded people to agree.
- Relationships, or the connections between people on social media, are essential in the sense that a scientist can decide when creating their platform whether creating fewer string ties or more weak ties fits better with their goals.
- Reputation of scientists on social media can be displayed through the endorsements offered on social media. Maintaining this reputation is crucial to remain relevant in the world of science on social media.
For this blog I chose to observe the Facebook social media page for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Space Biology Program, a company in my field of study of plants in microgravitational environments. Under NASA is the Space Biology Program which serves to build a better understanding of how spaceflight affects living organisms in space onboard the ISS. The social media page has 25,088 followers and was created October 31, 2013. This social media page is run by Elizabeth Keller, a senior scientist at the NASA Ames Center. On this page, what I mostly observed from their posts are a combination of articles on new discoveries and articles with explanations of concepts with a few promotions. This page seems to be a very professional page centered around new discoveries as well as informational posts for scientists on how to get their work out in the world for people to see. Along with a post about protecting astronauts from harmful bacterial to improve their health on missions is a share from another page, the Space Station Explorers, promoting a website to have your DNA experiment in space. Things that I think are innovative about this account is the ability of the page to contain such helpful information while also appearing very approachable to someone who might not be as well versed about the topic. Looking at its lower follow numbers, I think they could definitely benefit from some promotion. Promotion as simple as advertising the page more frequently on the NASA page could potentially go a long way. When looking at NASA’s website, there was only a link to a Facebook page. Since there is only a Facebook page and the count is low, I would suggest starting a Twitter account in order to broaden the audience.