 Welcome to this simple advice on social media for scientists. Why be on social media as a scientist when you already have so many other things to do? In my opinion, there are three reasons. To stay informed, to connect with colleagues and to brand yourself. In my experience, social media has been very useful to start collaborations, get invitations to present at conferences and meetings, and for recruitment of PhD students and postdocs. Fundamentally, all of this comes down to visibility. In this presentation, I'll go over some of the major social media platforms, how to consume information, contribute information, discuss the issue of institutional versus personal accounts, and finally address the issue of toxicity. Let's start with the major platforms. The first you think about are probably the social networks such as Twitter, which I still refuse to refer to as X, Facebook, LinkedIn and newer ones like Mastodon and Threads. However, there are also photos and videos being shared on sites such as Instagram and YouTube, and you have blogs or websites, depending on how you look at it, on platforms such as WordPress, Medium and Substack. So, which is the best? The cup out answer is none of them. The reason is that the value of social media really comes from the network effect. That is, the value of a platform is not the platform, but the people on it. So, you want to be where others in your field are. And this means that you'll probably want to be present on multiple different platforms. So, let's start with how to use them as a consumer. The obvious use is for finding useful content online. This is thanks to other people sharing links to, for example, scientific articles in research software or discussing science that you're interested in. This could be recent findings or general advice on how to do science or how to address certain kinds of problems. The problem is that you can very easily get information overload on social media and that it can therefore end up being a huge time sink if you're not careful. I think of social media as a filter. It helps me remove a lot of content that I then don't have to search for elsewhere. And therefore, the important aspect to me is the signal to noise ratio. And you find generally that when you have too much noise, most of the noise comes from a few accounts that are sharing way too much. So, follow selectively. That's the key to getting a useful feed on your social media accounts. Of course, social media becomes a lot more useful when you're also a contributor. That can be by creating content, sharing your findings or joining discussions. You want to think of yourself as being a filter that can provide quality content for others because that's how you get quality followers and thereby a valuable network. You'll probably want to use multiple different platforms for this and use them differently. For example, use some only for your scientific work that might be linked in and Twitter and use others for your private life that might be Facebook and Instagram. It's fine to do cross-posting on multiple platforms when it makes sense but you should not post everything and not everywhere. Your scientific followers will probably not want to watch photos of your breakfast. When online, you want to still be a real person. There are several types of accounts that you'll run into on social media. You've probably seen them, university accounts, research lab accounts and personal accounts. On social media, I think it's worth noting that institutions are not really social. It's very much one-way communication. It's typically much too broad, all the different research happening at a university and a lot of it is really self-advertisement. Both I and most people I know prefer to follow real scientists that they can relate to people who share their interests and that they can engage with in discussions and that's why also on a personal account, you want to avoid it being the kind of self-advertisement that you often see too much of, especially on platforms like LinkedIn. Finally, a word on toxicity and especially how to avoid it. It's a common criticism of social media, especially platforms like Twitter and YouTube that they can be very toxic and it's not a lie. However, I would say it is as a scientist mostly avoidable and the reason is that the toxicity is really down to people and topics and scientists are generally a pretty friendly community. There might be a few exceptions, but you can mute them. It's more difficult when you're dealing with a general public in which case certain topics will be very divisive. You might want to avoid discussing topics such as evolution or vaccines because it will just inherently descend into an uncivilized discussion. It's sad, but that's how it is. That's all I have to say about how to use social media as a scientist. If you want to learn more about how to communicate science in other ways, take a look at this presentation next. Thanks for your attention.