Social Media

What is social media good for?

Two-way communication

Social media is very effective when you want to have two-way communication and engagement rather than one-directional information dissemination. How can you do this?

Ask a question (Twitter has a poll feature)
Retweet, reply, and follow users
Participate in topical discussions where appropriate, providing relevant resources to build identity as a trusted source of information

Opportunities to cross-post and link other audiences

Leveraging the audiences of a trusted source of information for a topic online can be a great way to further your message.

Local Facebook pages (particularly in rural Alaska) are often reliable sources for news and information for communities. Posting in these groups, or contacting the page admins to see if they will share your content can be a good way to reach a target audience that doesn’t follow IARC platforms.
Accounts with larger followings may accept submissions for certain themed posts, which is a good way to reach a larger audience.
Example: @AGU_Cryo accepts submissions for #FieldworkFridays (email agucryosphere@gmail.com)

Posting ideas

Describe an instrument or technique
Describe a research campaign or scientific topic
Introduce a topic
Share historical information
Highlight researchers or staff
Researcher or staff accomplishments
Present new findings
Live posting at conferences
Dispel a common misconception about science or a particular topic
Surprising facts
Upcoming events/opportunities

Always attribute IARC

When posting to IARC platforms about one of the IARC subgroups, the preferred language is "at IARC's" or the IARC handle, followed by the organization name.

Example: “Joe Smith, a scientist at @IARC_Alaska’s Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center”

Tailor content to the platform

Facebook

Best for longer, more explanatory stories with links
Post frequency: weekly
Audiences: generally an older audience than Twitter/Instagram. Community, friends, and family, heavily used by Alaska Native communities

Instagram

Best for “behind the scenes” content, visual storytelling
Post frequency: daily to weekly
Audiences: public, friends, family

Twitter

Best for frequent, short, newsworthy stories, such as live coverage at events
Post frequency: daily or more
Audiences: reporters, academic peers, public

YouTube

Best for video content between 3 and 20 minutes in length or for broadcasting and archiving live events
Post frequency: monthly
Audiences: reporters, public

One key message or call to action per post

For longer content, a Twitter thread may be appropriate. This can be a useful way to pull out the key themes of a report or paper.

Consider:

Length—how long is your post?
Audiences—The interests and roles of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram users differ. Use the platform analytics and bios of your followers to get a better understanding of how to frame your content. On IARC's platforms, the most popular age range of users is:
- Facebook 25-44
- Instagram 25-34
This Pew Research study has information about social media audiences more broadly. For example, 77% of Facebook’s adult users are college graduates, compared to 42% of Instagram users.
Media—While a less than exciting image may be fine for accompanying a Twitter post, it will likely not do well on Instagram. Always try to use the best-quality image you can find!

Don't share graphics like these — hard to interpret at small sizes!

Make your posts memorable with visuals

Including high-quality and striking visual content can vastly improve the success of posts on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Visual abstracts for recent publications or reports have grown in popularity, and can improve the reach of scientific research. One study found that research articles posted on social media with a visual abstract were shared eight times more often than the same paper in text-alone format!

See a guide to making visual abstracts

On Twitter, you can add alt text to images and videos, so do so when including either. Consider how Twitter will crop your image in the preview, and adjust as needed.
Always ensure that you have the needed media releases to post images containing recognizable people, especially children.

Use Canva to design visuals for social media. Canva provides templates sized for each platform. These templates can be useful for creating quick, infographic-style visuals to accompany text.

Video creates engagement

Tweets with video see 10 times more engagement than those without, and produce the most engagement of any content type on Instagram.

Adobe Premiere Rush or Adobe Spark are video editing platforms suited for creating quick, on-the-go videos optimized for social media.
One of the best ways to improve engagement with video is to ensure you have good quality audio. Typically interviews or narration provide the key information while visuals are supplementary, so don't neglect quality recording.

Hashtags help your post reach a wider audience

Hashtags (particularly on Twitter and Instagram) provide an opportunity to reach a subset of users outside of your follower group. Used sparingly and intentionally, they can further the reach of your content and provide a way to participate in broad discussions related to science, the Arctic, and more. You can also follow relevant hashtags to keep up with the latest trends and conversation going on in that field.

Science community hashtags

Scientific communities on Twitter often use specific hashtags to congregate content on a topic. Searching variants of a topic hashtag can help identify which ones are widely used and active.

Examples: #scicomm, #fishsci, #cryospherewednesday #AGUCryo
IARC research groups should use the #IARCResearch hashtag where appropriate.

Science humor or trending hashtags

Occasionally a science-related hashtag will rise in popularity, offering a chance to participate in a global discussion.

These can span across disciplines as another way to humanize and share research. While not all are appropriate for a research institute to participate in, they can occasionally be leveraged to join a larger conversation in the science community.

Examples: #Overlyhonestmethods #Thisiswhatascientistlookslike

Conference hashtags

Most large conferences aggregate Twitter discussions through pre-determined conference hashtags. Make sure to check you are using the correct hashtags before the event begins to follow and contribute to the conversation.

Use tags wisely

For attribution or more direct callouts, tagging can be used either within a tweet or in the image/video tag field.

Used sparingly, this can be useful in alerting science blogs, media and journalists, or relevant collaborators about a noteworthy development.

Example: Tagging @Glacierhub in a post announcing the launch of a video series on glacial lake outburst floods in Juneau resulted in Glacier Hub not only retweeting, but contacting IARC and writing an article on the Glacier Hub blog for the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

Track campaigns with Google Analytics

For tracking the success of product launches and other social media or email campaigns, Google Analytics campaign tags are a useful tool. These tags allow you to track the resulting web traffic from each platform used in your campaign separately in Google Analytics.

Use the Google Analytics Campaign URL Builder to create a custom name, source, and medium for your campaign. If using various platforms (e-newsletter, Twitter, and Facebook, for example) you can set one URL each to compare the resulting web traffic.
Example: For an annual report launch, an example URL for Twitter would be: http://akcasc.org/annualreport2020?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=annualreport_2020
Use the URL in your posts (you can convert them to short links on the page).
After the campaign, go to Reports > Acquisition > Campaigns in Google Analytics to view the results.

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