Now that you’ve taken the time to ensure you’re informed on all the latest social media trends, how do you choose which platforms to spend your time on?
At this stage it can all seem overwhelming – every day you hear about a new platform, and you can barely keep up with following your friends on Instagram, let alone communicating your science in a meaningful way.
The good news is, you don’t have to be on every platform. Many you’ll simply be able to ignore for the purposes of communicating your science, even the trendy ones! Now comes the hard part: how do you determine the best places to post and curate your science-related content?
If you followed the advice earlier in chapter 3, then you’ve been researching how different demographics use different platforms (staying on top of trends). You’ve also been looking for other people talking about your topic using hashtags (social listening) and topic searches to find key influencers. You’ll notice that some platforms have more active conversations or communities of people you are interested in than others. For example, perhaps you’ve decided you want to reach other scientists or academics in your field. You start to listen on each platform, and you notice that Twitter has a community of academics using specific hashtags (like #PhDChat or #research). Or perhaps you’ve decided that since your science concerns children’s health you wish to find communities of parents who could most benefit from your work. While researching trends, you notice that new parents tend to visit Facebook groups and communities on Reddit… There are many different examples. Key to all is to make sure you do your research, and also use social listening to find your communities online.
Spend the bulk of your time on a maximum of two or three social networks that allow you to best reach the people you want to reach. Then keep listening to see what content most engages your community. Finally, use your content calendar as a guide and a record keeping mechanism to judge the success of your content. That way you can keep doing what works, and stop doing what doesn’t work.
This video by Simon Kemp, discusses how to choose the right platform based on objectives, context and resources, basically summing up what I’ve written above. Access the embedded video here, or if your device or web browser doesn’t support embedded video, access the video directly on YouTube at this link.
The next section will cover more strategies for creating social media content. You’ll learn about different types of content: video, audio, short and long form text across a few of the most popular platforms and you’ll learn about new and emerging platforms, how to build follower networks and whether to boost your content with paid advertising.