 Hi, welcome everybody. So now we start the biocell webinar. Today webinar is the number 60, and we are happy to have Michelle Mendoza from European Bioinformatics Institute that will tell us about social media in science communication. I'm Alessandra Rilla from the Royal Institute of Technology, and with me is Arna Proum from the University of Edinburgh. Michelle, something is a digital strategic offer or NBI, NBL in NBI. And so it's responsible for driving social media strategy, and it's helping a lot in creating the creation for topics for several projects including bioxial COE that is the one organizing this webinar. In her role, she's combining science and passion for storyteller to develop an effective social media campaign. So his work is driven by data, and he always try to follow the last trend, ensuring the standard practice of accessibility and digital platforms. Michelle holds a master degree in biotechnology from the University of Melbourne. So now I stop sharing, and I give the word to Michelle. Welcome. Thank you. I'm just going to share screen. Perfect. Okay, so hi everyone. Welcome to today's webinar on social media in science communication. My name is Michelle Mendoza, and I am the digital strategy officer at NBI. So just a little bit about me. I manage the social media content creation and overall digital strategy for bioxial among a number of other projects at NBI. I also help run training courses on how to use Twitter for the scientific research community, along with my colleague, Vera Matso. So what are we going to cover today? So today we're going to talk about the evolution of social media in science communication as affected by the pandemic. I'm going to talk about three examples of organizations and individuals that I think are acing the social game. And lastly, I'm going to cover personal branding if you want to be on social media and some do's and don'ts along with it. So with the onsite of the pandemic, we saw this entire evolution of how businesses and organizations operate. And we've seen that digital adoption has taken a quantum leap among these organizations. As you can see by this graph, we've seen that progression from the adoption has activated quite significantly with a lot of the customers moving towards online channels and a lot of respondents even say that according to the mechanism report that they are more 80% likely now to be digitally aligned versus prior to the pandemic. So as you can see by this graph that has significantly significantly increased across the time period of three years. And this is not it's globally but also in different areas of the world like in Asia Pacific Europe and North America. Now with people moving online. And while we had the pandemic while we still have the pandemic there was a lot of misinformation that was going online because misinformation is not a new thing that that has been going on for years and years. But with the access to social media and the access to, you know, posting something very readily. We've seen this rise of misinformation and the rise of anti vaccination and mass messages that we're coming across. Now a survey by the Royal Society for Public Health said that 50% of parents of children younger than five years regularly encountered negative messages about vaccination on social media. So how did how do we and how do we count to this and we saw this rise of public health officials, you know who were credible in their fields taking to social media to help counter counter this misinformation that was going on. So we saw that WHO, the World Health Organization had recognized okay this with this is an issue. A lot of the social media platforms as well had recognizes issue and they had started flagging misinformation, but a good initiative that was taken was that the WHO started partnering with influencers and they launched something called as the hashtag a safe hands challenge where basically it was was focusing on you know hand hygiene and how post so what they did was they asked influencers like Selena Gomez some major footballers to you know show showcase their videos of themselves washing their hands which was kind of a huge messaging that was delivered right at the start of the pandemic. We also saw data scientists partnering with micro influencers to spread facts on COVID-19 and vaccines on social media. So we saw how important it was at that point for a credible scientists to be on there to help counter counter those misinformation that was occurring at that time. So, as you've seen that the evolution and the importance of how much being on social media at that time came into play, we've also seen how differently people across the globe have been trying to improve their social media game across across the years. And according to me, among the number of campaigns that we have seen I have picked out three, three campaigns that have stood out to me. So the first one being the Royal Society of Chemistry. Now this, the Royal Society of Chemistry organizes the RC poster Twitter conference, which is basically an annual online event that is held entirely over Twitter to bring the scientific community to share the research and network. It's a great way for early career researchers to literally post their talk about their research and put their posters up there. And what the RC does is then they pick out their, I know, I think five or six best posters and then they make a whole Twitter thread about it. It's a great great way of holding a conference because one it removes environmental and financial costs. And the only thing you need is to create a free Twitter account which is great because it's accessible to pretty much every everyone across the globe. This some of the examples of some of the tweets you can see some of the researchers have put up their different posters. It's great because you can see the entire you literally have to click on that hashtag and the entire on the constantly every day, you can see a lot of these posters coming up and it's a great way to get involved with the research. The second one is John Hopkins University. This one stood out a lot to me because I think as I mentioned about the rice and misinformation and the anti mass messaging that was going on. John Hopkins found this. Okay, how do we how do we break the such complex piece of information because people were not having the information to how do these vaccines are made and how did they get approved so quickly. So they made a short YouTube video on the story of the vaccine by creating such a by breaking down that complex information into a more digestible format using animations. That video got across about 50,000 views which was very successful. And another one which is my favorite is the Twitter on Twitter they launched a campaign called as you know wear a mask please which was kind of a parody on a very popular song that came out in 2019 by a US female rapper Nicki Minaj. She made a song and what they did was they use that song and they put the lyrics of you know wearing a mask where they had the mascot wearing a mask and it went why it went viral across, you know, different, different new site picked it up and it kind of, you know, bought a hilarious and and so people made people focus on how important wearing a mask is but also bought it a more comedic way of looking at it which was which was great because you bought in a new audience to look at that. And then finally, my one of my other favorites is Raven the science Maven. So Raven is a science communicator she's an internationally acclaimed science educator and molecular biologist who works to progress inclusive science culture. Her USP is basically combining science in music. So what she does that she takes, she takes topics such as molecular biology, recently the vaccines recently a long COVID diseases that probably some people are not aware of, and she uses wrap to basically talk about the concepts that sometimes it's difficult to understand what she breaks them down in using music videos that she creates herself. And you know she uses her YouTube platform which she's very good at, and she creates relatable content about you know can I be a scientist Q&A with me tell me she's currently I think she just finished her PhD, and she talked about her entire PhD journey, using different videos and I think that's really beautiful because it talks about again. Generally, you know difficult to understand versus maybe using a paper but a research paper but then she uses video content to basically bring those concepts alive. So why, why did I choose these three, you know these three organizations, these three organizations individuals what stood out. I think we have a common thread amongst all of them. And that is the first one is identifying the right audience. And when I mean audience I don't mean the general public so this is a common misconception that a lot of people have is that, you know when they list audience they list audience as general public which doesn't exist because general public can include anyone and everyone and that's not what you want to do. When we talk about audience we want to talk exactly who we are trying to target so with, let's say with the RSC poster what they were doing is they were targeting early career researchers in chemistry who are looking to showcase their poster. So what they were doing was exactly targeting that audience and making sure that that campaign was successful. They were able to address a knowledge gap with with Dr Raven she was she saw that okay there was a need of understanding of, okay maybe how does this disease work why why do certain people get it versus why some people don't she understood okay there is a misinformation there there is not an understanding there so let me bring that bring that knowledge into a more fun and relatable way so she made music around that. And clear and effective communication with john Hopkins, they saw this need of okay we need to bring out why how this vaccine was developed and they use a three to five minute video and made a clear using animations they made a very simple way of communicating how that vaccine was developed versus maybe if you put out like a 180 page document no one's going to read that, but if I can sit down and watch three minute video, I know I'm now going to understand okay this is how why it, you know, got progressed so quickly and this that story then becomes a easier way for people to understand how a vaccine is made. So now these three principles I think is is key in general messaging across platforms, and this is something that I generally in integrate into my into my study and into my the way I work as well. So now I'm just going to talk a little bit about how then by so use these principles as well to build a community in biomolecular research. So, why, why were we on social media in the first place so when I started the account, when I was handed over the account, I, we probably had around what 500 followers, and I realized okay. Our importance being on Twitter is is there is a great importance for us to be on Twitter, but the reason why we do that is because one you get real time interaction so anytime I put up across an event. Is that this event is going to be popular or maybe it's not going to be popular because you're going to see that that engagement through likes or through shares so it tells me exactly what the community wants. I'm getting instant feedback so once we put up a webinar or if you put up a research paper out there people immediately start sharing they talk about it and they tell me if this is good or this is not good. It gives me a good feedback, which I can feedback to the team and tell them okay you know what these topics are relevant. Let's let's make more of this or let's write a blog post about this because people want to know more information and that that gives me that that feeds back into the team and helps us develop further and listening and engaging I think it's because there are so many conversations that happen that probably don't relate relate to us directly but are in our important in the conversation so for example, people are looking for a certain training and they're talking about you know what I want to look I want to learn more about QMM I want to learn more about bromance but I don't have access to that I can read those conversations and that conversations is important because it then tells us okay this is a this is a topic that people want to hear about so maybe we should be working on that. So, the approach that I just described is basically a community first approach where I looked at who is our audience as I mentioned or your audience has to be very specific so in our case it was early career researchers who are looking for training who are looking for basically who are looking to upskill in their in their career level. What are their pain points are what kind of forces are they looking for why do they want to upskill is there specific blockers that we can help as a as a as a co e to help you know progress into their career level. Are there specific you know areas of example if you want to do a new version of grow max is what what what is the problems that the community is facing while using the current version so listening to those those factors. And how is biocell active value to their lives. Often we've often see that when when you run a Twitter as an organization or even as yourself, you're often thinking, I want to put this out I want to put that out but you're never thinking what is the community actually benefit from that. It's not about you know constantly bombarding them with, we are doing this event we're doing that event because that after a point people don't care they want to see how you can actually add value to their lives. So what I'm doing is actually seeing okay this training is not benefiting them. Why are we doing this then there's no point of me putting out if not training then why if this blog post is not of interest to the community. You know what it's not going to go out let's put out something that that is important to them. So that's the approach I took forward. Through through the Twitter account that we had. And what was the outcome of it. So the outcome was that we have this flagship event call as the biocell summer school and we've seen that the applications increased from 80, which was generally what we were getting for a year to approximately 160 which is the highest we've ever reached for an event. And that's huge. We also saw higher participation in webinars, and we've seen increased engagement on Twitter. One of my favorite tweets that I've ever received as a social media manager was from a Twitter user, Mohammed Shahita. He's always constantly been engaging with tweets but also, I think what he did was he made a meme like a popular meme was flying around at that point and he added by excel into that. And I think that was lovely because we didn't ask him to do that he did that by himself but that just shows how much it meant to him that he didn't decide to generate a meme, you know, using by excel and how much it added value to his life. So I think that was that is one of the nicest thing to see being, you know, using the community first approach. Now I've talked to all, all about you know, being as an organization and all of these other things is, you know, being why we should be on social media but if you are an individual and you are interested to be on social media why should you. So the reasons are the first one is obviously it builds awareness of your research. You know, you obviously, scientists have want to publish papers and that's great because, you know, you get your research out there but what happens is with research papers only circulates among a certain population, certain section of population that has access to those research and is you're not then going beyond that beyond that little bubble that you have with by being on social media it's literally having everyone having access to what you're doing. It also establishes credibility as a leader. When I talked about the public health officials you know how important it was for them to come back on social media and combat those misinformation to actually give the facts. You know it gives you more credibility when you speak about a certain topic, because when you're constantly talking about it people look up to you then and say, Okay, so tomorrow if I want to know about molecular biology I know I have to come to this person if I want to know about HPC. I know this person is the one tweeting about it because I've seen them that they're posting a links to different papers or links to different facts that that is relevant to me. Last but not the least, I think which is a very underrated feature is networking opportunities and finding a community. When I started off in this industry I, you know, most of the things that I learned was literally by, you know networking with people that were working similar to me I didn't have anyone around me who was in the same field as me. What I did was I just reached out to different people via via DMs, and that's the beauty of social media is there is no hierarchy. You can really reach out to a CEO you can reach out to someone in the middle management you can reach out to anyone that you generally admire, and you can just literally shoot them a direct message or just comment below any of their posts and say hey I think you're really great. Can we connect on this and generally people are more inclined to reply on that versus a cold email. And you also find a community because there are so many communities I've seen, you know where PhD students talk about their struggles. When you talk about their research then you have postdocs and then you have people who are maybe more advanced in the industry who are looking for how to upscale, and you have these different communities that are that are online and it's great to talk about the same similar interests that sometimes they don't exist around you in in maybe in your lab or maybe in the office. So I think those are those are some of the reasons of why, why should one you should be on social media. So what are some of the commonly used platforms you decided okay I want to be on social media but which one should I be on. So let's talk about some of them so we have, you know, the popular ones here obviously our Twitter, Facebook, Instagram snapchat LinkedIn YouTube and the most recent one obviously ticked off. Personally, I love ticked off because it's got, you know, all my favorite content it's got comedy dance it's got hilarious takes on everything in life. And obviously followed closely by Twitter so these are my favorite platforms. But, you know, you, and you, you've decided okay, these are these are all the platforms but how do I decide which one to be on. And these are some of the factors that that affected so, you know, every, every platform is affected by the age location and interest so. So if you look in Latin America, Facebook is the one that's that's dominating in that country so if you are in Latin America it just makes more sense to be on Facebook. If you're on Europe then it's Twitter. If if you're in India again it's Facebook so you have to look at which platform, your your area is and also which what your interests are so if you're looking for more video based content then obviously you want to lean towards YouTube and Instagram. You're leaning towards more text based more short form then it's Twitter and probably Facebook and if it's more professional than it's LinkedIn. So depending on what you're looking at, choose, you know, you can select a couple of platforms that that you want to lean towards. But this is, again, another, you know, common misconception, and I give this advice to everyone, you don't have to be on our platforms, whether you're an organization or whether you're an individual. It's one, and that works for you that one that you genuinely enjoy because there is no point being on a platform that you cannot like for example I love to talk that's why I'm on to talk. I don't like on I don't like Facebook it's not my favorite platform which is why I generally don't tend to be there personally. But when you want to share messaging you have to genuinely enjoy the platform you are on. And if you're an organization on organization then you are going to spread yourself very thin by trying to be on all different types of platform because they all work very differently. And if you're not well worse than how they work you're going to find a really hard time to try and trying to be on all of them. So my advice is all just choose one platform that you genuinely enjoy that works for you and you can deal with the content according to that. So, now let's talk about how do you optimize your social media profile so if you are new to this and or you have been there for a while and you want to see okay I want to get better at doing this. Let's look at it from a broad perspective now social just the one example that I have is from Twitter, but obviously every profile is made of the same three components, the header profile photo and your bio. Usually your social media profile is kind of like your elevator pitch or your first impressions. Whenever you visit a social media profile the first thing you want to look at is make sure you have a good header picture that can be anything that can be any banner that you want to select profile photo have a good profile photo if you don't want to put your photo in there that's fine, but make sure you have something on there it's not be like the blank egg or whatever. Make sure that if you want to put your own photo you can put an animation of anything else that's fine and have a complete bio because before someone presses follow on you know Twitter LinkedIn whichever platform the first thing they come and look at is your bio. And if it doesn't state what you do, you know how you're going to have a less chance of people actually want to engage with you because they don't really know what they're stepping in for. So make sure you have a nice attractive shot snappy bio for people to read into before they before they follow you. So talk about what makes a good post. Always keep it short and simple. Now there are different platforms that restrict you for example Twitter has a word limit of weighty characters, Facebook and Instagram. Don't really have that so you can, you can go ahead and do that but the shorter the better because you're always in, you know, people are have come across like thousands and thousands of posts every day. They're not going to sit and read through art, you know, long forms of text if you're going to constantly write more so always make sure what you're writing is short and simple. Keep it to 200 to 300 words. Use images post with images generally get two to three times more engagement obviously make sure they're relevant you don't have to use it for the sake of it but it's always good to use one. Be careful using images if you don't own the copyright because you don't want to steal images from other people's work. Make sure you're crediting when you are using other people's images and if you don't have any then just there are plenty of websites that actually helps you source free images so you can go to unsplash.com pixels.com they have lots of lots of images for you to use. The third one which I say is do not overuse hashtags now this is one of my biggest pet peeve. So, again, this is very tailored to different platforms now on Instagram. Yes, hashtags is fine because that's exactly how the algorithm functions. If you're on Twitter, LinkedIn still okay, but if you're on Twitter. No, it's a big no no according to me. Now the only place when you would use the hashtag is if you are targeting an event so if you have an event based hashtags. That's okay because that's how you will track different posts, and you want people to tweet about your events so it's always good to have an event hashtag. In general, no because the algorithm has changed since you know since Twitter was launched yes there was a emphasis on hashtags. Now in fact if you use more than two three hashtags in a post Twitter is automatically going to start restricting your your post because that's they generally don't want you to do that. The way Twitter works is that it focuses on the keyword just like and and this is not only restricted Twitter this restricted this is this applies to every social media platform. They focus on the keyword which is basically the word you're typing in. So instead of saying hashtag science is awesome. I would just say science is awesome and if you look at any viral tweets or any wild content across. They do not have hashtags. So minimize that mostly also because it doesn't read that well. Avoid jargon. This is a huge one as well. So I've just given an example here so if you can see the before says. Did you know that other male chickens can propel themselves up to 200 feet in the air, meanwhile roosters don't lay eggs. Also roosters grow at sunrise in this blog post we will talk about roosters. Now that looks just a lot of sentences that don't seem to be telling me what I'm going to be reading about. Now if you look up to the after statement it says did you know that roosters can fly up to 200 feet. In this blog post we will discuss the roosters aerodynamic abilities. So this tells me exactly what I'm going to read. And that's a great way of writing clear and effective messaging. Now obviously you don't want to be, you know, using extremes oversimplified language because if you're talking to a scientific audience that's not the aim, but you can use a certain scientific terminology when it's accepted within your audience. What I mean is use simplified words because we're not in a fancy writing competition. What we're trying to do is get clear and effective messaging in certain contexts yes you might want to use you know complicated words but this is not the case you want to use plain language as much as possible. So, in case instead of using utilize objective facilitate illustrate locate change that all to use goal help explain fine, you can go to any plain language website and it's going to give you synonymous of all of these words and I try to improve that as much as possible My main aim is not to confuse the reader and not to make my sentences as complicated can play complicated as it has to be. I wanted to be as simple that the reader can read and maybe a couple of seconds and get the messaging across. So always make sure that your language is as simple and plain as possible. Now I'm going to talk about something that is probably not talked enough in within while we use social media and that's accessibility best practices. Now the reason why we are content should be accessible is because we have a huge chunk of the population that does have visual and cognitive disabilities. Now if your content is not accessible you're kind of you're removing that whole, or you're restricting your limiting your reach of your post and they don't get to access what you're what you're putting out there. When you put something out there on social media you don't know who it is going to basically you're putting it out there and the algorithm will push it. The more you don't make it accessible the more the algorithm is not going to favor that content. So how can you do that you you add you make your content accessible by adding alternative text. So what is alternative text it's basically a word of phrase to tell the viewers what the content of an image is. So it's basically to describe what your images. So how can you do that so when you when you and accessible, all text is available on all social media platforms. So whenever you upload an image, you can, you will give you something like an ad description on Twitter you can see I've added one for LinkedIn. It exists on Facebook, all social media platforms have access to that all you have to do is click on that ad description button, and you just have to write a quick couple of lines of what the image consists and this is this is applicable to websites as well. So you just have an alt alt text as well so make sure you include that as well. So what happens here is in this all text what would I add so since this more text heavy I would just write whatever's in that image so social media and science communication 70 February 15 CET. If it's an image of a person then you can describe so for example if it's image of myself I would say a woman with wearing glasses with black hair and a red t shirt. There are a lot of good websites that actually tell you how to describe an image so I would highly encourage you to look at that and it takes practice I generally did not know anything about all text when I started off in the industry. It took me again I I was on Twitter and I learned I followed people who are very good at this and that's how I became better at writing all text. So it's something we just have to keep on learning and as social media gets better at doing this. Another bit you want to do is using camel case in hashtags when camel case is basically capitalizing the first letter when you add two words in a hashtag so for example if you have hashtag molecular biology, you want to capitalize the first letter of each word. The reason being is that the screen reader which is basically I didn't describe what that is. So a screen reader is basically an access accessibility tool used by people with visual impairments is basically like a browser extension where it basically describes the what the image is. Or for example or describes or it reads out text. So when you put hashtag molecular biology and if you didn't capitalize it it would just read it as one word. Now that sometimes doesn't make it might make sense in molecular biology but there are certain words that you have to capitalize otherwise they will not read. They will not read well. Also, it also does not read well in general if you do not capitalize because if you have a complicated word, it's just going to read it, you're not going to understand you know so for example if I say, in case of this just a hypothetical sentence if you had to hashtag something like that if I didn't capitalize everything, it would not make sense to a reader of what you're trying to say. So make sure you capitalize the first and first letter of each word. If you're adding a lot of videos if say for example if you're an Instagram or if you're adding it even on Twitter or LinkedIn make sure they always have captions. And another big pet peeve I have is make sure that you always limit limit your emoji used to do three and use it at the end of the text. The reason why is because, for example, if I had a text and I had three smiley faces at the beginning the screen reader is going to read it as smiley face smiley face smiley face. And the text and then if you had maybe a couple more emojis then it's going to read smiley face smiley face smiley face. So something that would have would, which should take two to three seconds for it to read is going to take thing now 10 to 20 seconds and the person is going to click off again you're limiting the person. You're limiting your content from that person, you're just making it more inaccessible and again the emojis are more, it looks good yeah short for the post but it's not functional and it is not accessible. So I would if you want if you really have to use an emoji I would encourage you to instead of using so for example if you want to use bullet points, use, use the dash dashes or use the, you know the normal functions that you have a new keyboard, rather than using the emojis you have a lot of fancy emojis that you have access to but I would just stick to the normal traditional because yeah emojis can make it look nice and pretty but it's not functional. Now when. So that's that's the about the accessibility bits. So now when we talk about as you constantly are on social media as you can constantly post content you are going to get comments and that's that's fine that's just generally how it works. So how do you handle negative feedback online. And this is this is something to understand is that if you all feedback that you get, you know all negative feedback is not bad. Sometimes yes you know there is there is a chance as humans we do post incorrect information. Sometimes we, we post something you know that is not correct, and it's okay so if you do that you can and if you receive criticism or post something with errors, engage respectfully and send a correction if needed. If it's completely wrong it's okay to delete a post and say oh I made a mistake I delete the post the world is not going to end it's fine. And if you see sometimes people having you know a lot of conversations and you feel that this is not you know you don't want to make this public make sure you can take it to a direct message and have that conversation out there. There is obviously a difference between negative feedback and trolling always stay away from the trolls, you can see that if you post something about vaccination you'll see always anti vaccination anti vaccination messages coming across. Generally, those people are there to fuel your anger and you don't want to engage with that to not fuel the trolls because that just makes them, you know just makes them better at what they do so this engage with that. And if you're not sure about okay does make sense or not consult with a colleague consult with a friend I always make sure that sometimes if something doesn't make sense to me I will write it. And at different times I will show it to a friend and say okay does this read well or does it not be well, or if you have access to a communications department. Always good to them because they obviously have access to all the tools that they need and they can tell you if you know so sometimes there are different prices and sometimes it makes sense to put something and it doesn't for example if you were during the pandemic and you talked about a face to face right at the beginning you know when things were locking down and you talked about, we are going to have a face to face event obviously that's insensitive so make sure that if there are some things that you're not sure about and start with someone who understands the current calm crisis and can help you out with that. And lastly, I think it's very very important to be yourself, be authentic and prove yourself. It's okay to talk about your life and personal interests as per your comfort level. If you met someone in face to face and all they talked about was bioinformatics for the rest of the lives, you're going to get annoyed after a point and think, Okay, this is great for you know my job. Okay, and yeah once in a while okay but you want to learn a little bit more about the person you're following I especially really like that I like people who are a little bit more human relatable. Again, you don't have to share every single detail of your life and if you don't feel like you don't want to put that part of yourself out there that's absolutely okay you don't have to do that. Sometimes it's nice to if you if you want to build a following it's nice people like to see the relatable bits about you so if you really like movies you like food you like you know board games talk about that talk about your personal interest you will find a community that really wants to then learn about that aspect of your life. And that makes it more interesting. Also putting the social in social media, I think this is a bit people tend to forget is when you put out content you always think okay I'm going to talk about this I'm going to talk about that, but you're not really engaging with the people that are there online and that's the point of the whole of social media is to it's a two way street, it can never be one way even as organizations if you're only constantly talking about, look at these events like this is what I'm going to do. People are not going to engage with you back, you always you know have to talk about if someone shares something about you comment, you know, if as an organization, talk, read with them, or if you are, you know if you have someone who said something below your post where you talked about your research paper comment and have a conversation out there that's the whole point of engaging with people out there. And another tip I can give over here is that when I first started tweeting I was very overwhelmed and I was like I can't put myself out there I think this is just you know it's it's too much, I can get very overwhelmed. So what I did was I just started retweeting I found that easier than actually putting out a tweet, and what I would do is comment so another tip I would give is just comment below people's posts so you don't actually have to tweet directly. Just you know if you see someone saying, I, you know they post about a research paper comment below their posts and say oh I think this is really important and that gives you a confidence of actually putting yourself out there more, and you know it gets you better at writing. And then when you feel confident enough you can actually tweet your own content. And then finally social media and mental health. It's very important to understand that yes it can be very overwhelming when you start off. You know there's constant, you know, there's, there's a lot of information going out there it's easy to boom school and think oh my God, how am I going to keep up with all of this information and the point is you don't have to. Just curate the timeline and as and that the algorithm will do it for you the more safe the more post if I like about board games it's just going to be showing me more about board games. So you can curate the timeline that looks good for you and you don't have to be there online 24 seven if there are days that you don't want to be there, that's okay there's no hard and fast rule here. It's okay to take mental health breaks and make sure you deserve dedicated hours for yourself so, for example, when I started off I was just you know working weekends I was working every single day because that's kind of how the job was. And then I realized now that was not giving there was not impacting me positively so I had to then say okay not going to do it from you know nine to five okay and then after that I'm not going to touch it. So that's that's generally even for my personal social media use. So just make sure that you have the dedicated hours that you have once as you're getting slowly into it and I think once you become a pro and once you use to it and it becomes a lot more easier. So let's summarize what I've been talking about so far. So obviously choose a platform that works for you, you don't have to be there on all of them. Choose one that you genuinely enjoy and that that is you know popular within your location and use that. Identify audience be very very specific about who you're actually trying to target rather than just saying I'm going to try to target everyone because that just generally doesn't work. Keep it short simple and accessible the shorter the snappier the better and be authentic and true to your messaging. Don't put something out there that doesn't you know that doesn't feel true to yourself. And that's it. So I would like to thank Alexander and I know for this opportunity was great to be on here. And if you anyone want to just get in touch, you know, I don't really talk about science a lot. My Twitter is mostly about movies and F1 I've decided being getting into F1 so I really enjoy that. And Bollywood and things like that. So if you want to follow it's Michelle's do my LinkedIn is Michelle Mendoza and that's my email address if you just want if you had any questions beyond anything else feel free to shoot a DM. And I'm happy to take any questions right now. Okay, Michelle. Thank you very much. Very interesting talk. I think you covered very nicely, both the aspects of an organization organization, you know how an organization should consider engaging on social media, and also how individuals should consider social media, both for, you know, I guess personally but also in terms of their career and everything so very nice. Thank you. We have already a couple of questions. If anybody has not yet asked a question and you have have something in mind, just use the the Q&A button in zoom, click that little window open up and you can enter your question there. And then we'll read out the questions. And then let me show answer. So the first question is from Piret. She asks, how would you grab the audience's attention if it's not in the organization's brand to use memes. It's my face. Okay, so if. So what I understood is that you, if your organization doesn't use means the. That's a good question again. That's a good question. Yeah, so essentially that's it. I think so the question is, how would you grab the audience's attention. If it's not in the organization's brand to use memes so I guess. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so the so if you're, if you're running a brand organization and you, and it's in your guidelines not to use memes and I wouldn't use me so from a brand organization point of view. Follow what the guidelines for you will have design or social media guidelines of what your organization should run as a brand. Just because it's popular doesn't mean you should do it so I, as a bio cell, I've never tweeted and never use means because it doesn't fit with what we do. And that's okay we don't have to you don't have to go with every trend that works on social media that's fine. If you are as a person running a Twitter account like your own personal Twitter account that's fine you can use memes because I don't see any reason of why you should not be able to do that. But that's generally my answer to that question so if you're an organization follow whatever the guidelines have been given by your comms department. And if you're a personal then you should be able to have freedom on what you do on your personal account. I think you actually already provided some additional things that you mentioned how to engage how to start engaging my commenting and things like that to grab to start to grab attention. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. The next question is from Dana. Dana asks for the organization. IE I guess, tweeting as an organization or trying to serve not tweeting necessarily engaging social media as an organization. How often would you recommend to post the tweets is about tweeting on a daily basis. Is there a recommended time, for example on the Monday morning. So this is a good question because there is often you know people say you should be posting three times a day you should be posting four times a day. And I don't think so that really works. I think, yes, when you are starting an organizational account. You should be posting as much as possible because the as, as the algorithm, the algorithm functions so the more you tweet obviously the algorithm is going to push more tweets so obviously if you suddenly blank you know don't talk about anything for like week or two weeks, you kind of disappear. And it's very hard to restart so you want to be tweeting as much as you can, but there is no number. So, if you don't have good content, don't read it because then you're just doing it for the sake of doing and it's not, it doesn't look good. So I would recommend if you're starting off to tweet, if you have the content do it one time. So tweet post whatever it is one time a day at least. It's okay to do twice a day. There is no again there is no set timing. That's something you have to do research on your own. So the way I did it was I would, I tweeted at different times. And I tweeted on different days, and I got all that data so use you have Twitter analytics so every day platform social media platform has an analytics, you can data so you look at the data I look at the data for three months and I saw okay. This this this time and this this day works really well for a content so that's the day that I get the most engagement, and that basically dictated on when I should be tweeting so I didn't look at some you know I didn't Google. Okay, when should I be tweeting. So you also want to think about where your audience is sitting so the audience that bikes and follows is very generally European. So now obviously I will be tweeting between European Central European time. Now if my audience was in Latin America, I obviously wouldn't be tweeting in the morning I'll be tweeting and if I'm based in Europe and I wouldn't be tweeting in the morning I would be tweeting in the afternoon because I need to target that audience that's sitting in that time zone. So that's what would dictate so I would say start with your own research just tweet at random times and then look at the data and then that will tell you when exactly those times and days work for you better. Thank you. I think that definitely answers it. Okay, then we have another question from Daniel. So when using a network like LinkedIn, where you receive requests to connect with people. Many times you receive requests from legitimate legitimate profiles that you simply know you have no connection with. And if they had a specific purpose for connecting with you, they could write an intertext, you know, so what is your opinion on accepting those requests I guess if they don't write an intro text, but they just, they just tried to connect. Yeah, I think that that's very depending on person to person so I don't accept. I don't accept requests from people who I don't see an alignment with what I do. So for example if someone's in the comms field. And if they, if they write so obviously I will not accept anything from people who don't write an intro text at all. That's just generally a rule I have set up for my LinkedIn again in organization LinkedIn obviously there's no thing as connects I'm guessing you talk about personal. So again, if you, if there is no intertext and that depends on you if you just want to increase your LinkedIn followers because you, you will see a lot of people who have 500 plus connections 1000 plus connections and you wonder how do they even reach that level when, you know, they're not posting any content and that's just possibly because people are just, you know, clicking connect with me connect with me and that's just another strategy for people to increase their following. But then, again, just like any, any other platform then your quality of your, you know, the audience who's following you is not good enough because the time you want them to reply to something or you are posting about an event, you will not see any engagement because they really don't care about your content they're just there for the numbers. So if that is not, that is not how you want to lead your LinkedIn profile strategy then I would not accept any request unless they there is a reason of why they connected always it's always good to have intertext. But that's just like, I think that's just the basis of any networking even just in person networking when you collect business cards. It's the same thing is just going to sit in the back burner and really doesn't do anything so it all depends on how you want to, you know, take your own personal LinkedIn strategy there. I think that makes sense. Yeah. So we don't currently have any other questions from attendees if anybody else has a question please feel free to enter. I do have one or two things questions I'll send it if you want to ask as well. But I have some some yeah some ideas or some questions. Just one thing I want to add that I will activate a rise and so if people as question after our no question they can just use a rise and so they, they have less barrier maybe because we have time. Yeah. Yes, thank you. Good. Yeah, so I was wondering I think you made a you outlined the considerations about what platform to choose. And the first one was basically what platform or are you comfortable with. I mean I guess that might be aimed more at perhaps a personal rather organizational but even if you're managing an organizational social engage social media engagement you want to do that on the platform where you kind of maybe know what you're doing if there's a two platforms are equally appropriate space in the community. But so so my question was, my question was around who isn't on what platforms so who are you missing out on how to how to from organizational perspective, maybe choose the right platform based on understanding what community so you had the the chart showing, you know, which, which country, some of the platforms are more more common than there's an age breakdown. But if you have an example like where you're trying to reach, say, say for example trying to reach you know, scientific, early, early research career community for for targets and trying to reach people and engage people for training. Are you. So for Twitter might be good because a lot of people on Twitter for professional reasons or for, you know, for, for this kind of this kind of engagement. Do we have a sense is anybody have a sense of what parts of communities were missing out to people who are not on Twitter, are they any systematic kind of sort of biases in terms of who are missing out to who is on Twitter isn't on Twitter in a rough sense or that they're very difficult to say. Yeah, so I think this is very very directly related to how much effort and resources you have. I think, yes, in an ideal world, if you look at big brands, they are present on every platform. The reason is because obviously you want to reach as many people as you can that's always the idea of of being on social media as a social media manager. But if you don't have the resources. That's when that's why I mentioned you only will be active. Because the idea is, as I mentioned, every platform has a different or requires a different level of effort to capture that community. Now if you don't have the resources if you have only one person trying to. I can give you a story or so when I started off with social with by cell we had only the Twitter account, and we had the LinkedIn LinkedIn wasn't, you know, it wasn't my focus at all because I didn't think there was going to be of any use to it. I focused my main efforts on Twitter when I saw the Twitter community growing and growing where I didn't have to put you know I put a significant amount of effort in the first six months and I saw okay now that's taking off I don't have to worry about it too much. That's when I went to LinkedIn and in LinkedIn I got a different section of audience probably more industry focus probably more advanced in their career and that's where I captured that audience and I saw that that's growing so we went from I think what 300 400 1,300 followers like that was and that was quick that grew very quickly. And then what I did was okay I realized okay we're missing out chunk of people that are you know I didn't see engagement from Eastern Europe I didn't see engagement from Asia in our Twitter and communities and I realize okay we're probably missing a huge chunk that would probably be wanting to come to our trainings. So I started a Facebook account. But now with Facebook is what happens with Facebook is a lot more because it's been in the game for such a long time and its algorithm is completely way different from the other platforms and it's flowing down. I didn't see the results that I wanted. Now as a one person as a one person job this is it's becoming very hard to manage all these different platforms and I realized there is no point of me trying to engage trying to capture that on Facebook so what I what we do is we have the email we have an email list again in digital marketing you have different platforms it's not only social media it's also the email list, but the email list will reach those people in these in these communities that we are probably not capturing on Facebook. So I realized okay why am I concentrating my efforts in on Facebook when it's more complicated and I can just use email to reach those people. So you, it's if you have all the resources if you have a team of three or four people who can do that for you. Yes, I would advise you to be on all those communities. But I think that's very, very, very directly related to the amount of time and resources you have because it takes a lot of time to craft content to find those communities because I'm also listening and engaging to those conversations as I mentioned it takes a lot of time to actually just sit there and go through all the conversations that people are having and to feed that back. So if you, if you really want to be capturing those communities then you will have to invest in having a couple of comms people within the team who can then do that for you to capture those communities. That makes sense. Yeah, thank you. So a couple of couple more questions. So, Roberta asks, to which year does the graph on the platform share time that you were showing refer to my guess so yeah asking from what data from is still recent and is Facebook still so popular today. Yeah, so that I think that's not very. Sorry, I should have probably gotten the right dates but I think that was sometime in 2019 or 2018. But, but the graph still holds true. Facebook is still the dominant platform, even though the algorithm and you know there is a shift of the people you can see a lot of millennials, and a lot of Gen Z are on TikTok with the rise of TikTok and rise off Twitter and you know Instagram. It's huge, but Facebook still is the dominant player in the game. People are still active on Facebook they still have a lot of users on their platform. It's a different story of how much you know the content is actually reaching that's a different thing so if you have money so the way Facebook post work is that if you put money behind them yes, and if you sponsor and put them on there, it will promote organic reach which is basically you just posting by yourself is now limited and that's the problem with Facebook which is why a lot of people are turning away from Facebook. So, but again it very much depends on your location, Facebook with that without the money even it's still popular in Latin America, Twitter is not the platform of choice there so if you wanted to reach a Latin American audience being on Facebook makes sense to you. If you are trying to reach a more and again different demographics if you're trying to reach more Gen Z millennial people then being on TikTok Instagram is is the way to go. So again very very depends on which who you're trying to target over there. Cool, thanks I think that's clear. There's a question from seeing seen asks a question about Twitter specifically, I say he's saying I'm perhaps quite active on Twitter with my personal account. Now particularly in COVID days, lots of discussions on public health. I wonder how to indicate better, whether posting as an expert or posting as a semi informed member of the public. So I see some people trying to use multiple accounts for one for personal or professional, but it gets too difficult for him as the overlaps are too big so what's certainly good strategies in this respect. Yeah, so I don't think so you need to have a personal professional Twitter account that's just my. That's just the way I think I think you should just just have one account that's fine and you can decide how you want it to be so if you just wanted to keep it purely professional. If you want to make it more personal that's fine too. When we talking about discussions so for example if you are talking more about public health, if you don't consider so that's very obvious so if you put in your bio as I mentioned that bio is that is that driving your first impression, if you are a public health specialist, you can put that in your bio and that's immediately going to tell the person, this is a public health specialist, who has the expertise in the area and that will give you that it will give the audience the first impression Okay, I'm following a public health specialist if you're not putting that in your bio and if you are talking about different things, you know, it's people before they start following what they do is they look, they will look at your bio and they will also look at your tweets. If you've never talked about public health and you suddenly start talking about COVID randomly, you know, no one's going to immediately just trust that if you don't have the facts to back it up. If you do if you don't feel confident in putting posting about public health, retweeting the people who are the actual experts is the way to go and that's generally how I do it if I don't feel confident in enough in myself, not confident myself but if I'm not a public health specialist and I will not pretend or not pretend to be but I will not post that information like I know it I will in fact amplify the people who are who are the ones that are the specialist in this field. Now if you do have the expertise then it's okay to put that information out there as long as you can always refer back to facts rather it's always good to have a link to some document that is verifiable. And that's just that anything that has an impact on the public always link to verified information because then the people can always click on that link and then see okay what this person is saying is true or not. Cool yeah that makes a lot of things. Thank you. So I guess in this case team should make clear that he says in this bio what his expertise is and also says that saying his bio that he's a semi-uniform member of the public on other topics. But there's not much spacing the bio I guess that we have still want one more question for now that might be might be the last one. And also given the time. Goran asks, could you provide some general tips on sponsored content. Is it worth it in the scientific field and how can I decide what type of content justifies paid campaign. Yeah, there is obviously there is. And so I'm not I'm generally I would say I'm a social media manager with more expertise in organic which is based what when I mean by organic so you have social media managers that work in organic and in ads. So organic is basically putting out content or post Twitter post or LinkedIn post that don't have any money behind them which is basically free anyone who posts anything on social media. And then on social media also allows you to put money behind them. So what happens is when you click on a post you can select how much money money, you want to put behind a post and what happens is then, then Twitter will then boost that more than your organic, you know, the one that doesn't have money on it because that's the way they make that's way that's the way the social media platforms make money by through ads. So, if you have a budget for it. If you think, say if you have an event and you want to expand that reach of that event, you can put money behind that and you can run a paid campaign that will run for say a particular week. It depends on how much again depends very much on your budget if you have a huge budget sure you can put probably put that behind every post, but if you come from a organization which doesn't have the relevant budget. So what you can do is select if you have a big conference coming up then put money so we put money behind. We just ran the we just ran a conference last year which was the advances and challenges and biomolecular simulations and I ran a paid post for that. So, if you have a big major conference coming up then select the conferences that matter to the organizations and put money behind that. Which type of content very much depends on what you are trying to promote if you're trying to get higher registrations, then you can put money behind that if it's just maybe you know, oh, I look at the latest research and you don't think you really, you know, even if it doesn't if you don't get a lot of people reading it and it doesn't matter, then don't put money behind that very much depends on what you're trying to gain out of that campaign. I suppose, yeah, I suppose paying to have your own research gain attention might not be convinced most people. So, I think you want to talk about the next webinar that we have coming up so first of all, certainly say again Michelle thank you very much is great. Thank you. And thank you for answering all the questions. That's great. But yeah, Alexander, do you want to tell us about the next webinar. Yeah. So let me just give the time to share my screen. My presentation. So, the next bike sale webinar will be the eighth of March, and we will have what is new in Gromach 20, 20 second and the speaker will be the Gromach's manager, Paul Bowers. And that is all and I, yeah, I think I will close now the webinar. I thank you everybody, Michelle and all the attendees and for the active participation that I really enjoy. Thank you very much for joining.