Reaching beyond the geosciences choir with social media
Those in the public, private, and government sector increasingly rely on information and news from social media outlets and websites. AZGS stakeholders are no exception.
A new open-file report, ‘Reaching Beyond the Choir: Using an integrated social media-web platform to share the research products of a state science agency’, documents our success to reach a broader audience via social media and web outlets.
About 60% of US adults rely on the internet as their primary source of information for science-based inquiries (Brossard, D. and Scheufele, D.A., 2013). A Pew Research Center report shows that Youtube and Facebook are accessed by 73% and 69%, respectively, of all adult US internet users (Perrin and Anderson, 2019). Instagram (37%), LinkedIn (27%) and Twitter (22%) follow in their wake.
Over the past decade, AZGS staff have leveraged social media and web platforms to reach beyond our native stakeholders -- geologists, environmental geologists, mining engineers, and federal, state, county, and tribal government agencies -- to the broader public with information and insight into Arizona’s geologic setting, geologic hazards, and mineral resources.
The results are heartening. We now have more than 20,000 Facebook and 7,200 Twitter followers; our footprints on LinkedIn (~1,500), Youtube (~1,200), and Instagram (124) are more modest. Our primary AZGS websites – Home site, Document Repository, and Mining Data – draw tens-of-thousands of individuals annually. The two most popular pages at our homesite, azgs.arizona.edu, are ‘Geologic Hazards’ and ‘Mining and Minerals’.
Citation: Conway F.M., 2020, Reaching Beyond the Choir: Using an integrated social media-web platform to share the research products of a state science agency. Arizona Geological Survey Open-File Report-20-01, 18 pages.
Infographic: Talking Geoscience 2019