It’s been about two weeks since I started actively using this blog and as you’ve probably seen I’ve been busy. While I started this blog, I also started to think about how to get people to read it. The most obvious answer is social media. Social media channels are made to engage people and show them what you find interesting. For a long time I’ve only been using Facebook for private and LinkedIn for work purposes. I never really used Twitter because I always thought it’s mostly a platform where politics and media exchange views and act like they are the public.
Than I had a seminar about science communication with Susanne Geu. She told me Twitter is an excellent platform for science communication so when I started the blog, I also started to become active on twitter.
After about two weeks of active work on this blog and different social media channels I made the following discoveries
When it’s about clicks on your blog forget Twitter. You can very quickly find a great bubble of people working in a similar area and engage them quickly (from 1 to 70 followers in one week) but people on Twitter like it short. From thounsands of impressions you get a few hundred interactions and from those only a handful are clicks on your links. However it is still a great tool to get in touch and to communicate punchlines.
LinkedIn works about as good as I expected. Since I have a lot of contacts there I get a lot of quite some likes and quite some clicks but no active discussion or interaction.
I originally wanted to keep Facebook private but I still posted my Blog so friends could see what I’m doing and that obviously brought some encouragement. To tell friends, family and people you know what you’re doing you can also use the WhatsApp status.
What works really well to get clicks but also really good discussions is groups in Facebook. Find some good science groups and post and discuss there. This is not too easy because most groups in Facebook are either full of spam or completely inactive but there are some.
I’ll write an update on my experience with social media in a few months maybe then my impression has changed but so far I’d say all these channels have merits and a different target group.
What I did’t try yet because I do not really thinks that’s my audience is Instagram and TikTok. But maybe I’m wrong there so if you have a different opinion on these networks please let me know.
If you want to see what I do on these platforms please follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter!