BAMOS
Mar 2019
News
Making a Twitter splash on International Women’s Day
Alvin Stone
As we headed into International Women’s Day on 8 March,
the Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes Graduate
Director, Melissa Hart (@melissatraveler), wanted to make
a social media splash and highlight the almost 100 women
who work at the Centre. With this in mind she decided to
create a collage of all the women at the Centre and post it on
Twitter and Facebook.
To create the collage, Melissa used an online collage maker,
Turbo Collage. This comes in a paid and free version, with the
free version using a branding at the bottom right.
Once this was compiled, Melissa posted the following:
But more than that, Melissa has a history of tweeting about
gender equity issues in science, so Twitter recognises her
account as being focussed in this area. As a result, when she
made her post, it was elevated in feeds that were likely to
engage with this tweet.
This is a key point to understand when planning social media
campaigns. Social media algorithms look for consistency in
accounts over time when deciding whether to place them in
front of other social media users. It’s why you must be very
narrowly focused and consistent with social media accounts
to get the best reach into the area you hope to influence.
Think about it, in 2017 every minute there were 448,000
tweets, 317,000 Facebook updates, 66,000 Instagram
uploads. And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. You can find
more social media statistics here. Because of this blizzard of
interaction, social media algorithms have been developed
that decide which post, tweet or photo you see on your
account.
There are quite a few ways to increase the reach of your
posts but when it comes to planning for specific events, a
simple rule of thumb is to start mentioning those events
(say Science Week) around six weeks beforehand and use a
hashtag aligned to that event.
Six weeks is considered a good lead time that gives the
algorithms of major social media outlets time to adjust and
recognise your account as one working in this space. That
means when the day or week of the event falls, and you post
something, that post will appear on more social media feeds.
Those accounts that decide at the last minute to post
something that is not a normal part of the feed to catch the
wave of an event, will find their posts will have far less reach.
The Tweet was immediately picked up and spread reasonably
rapidly. Obviously, the image was striking but a key
reason for the pick-up was the result of Twitter’s algorithm
process. To start with, she used three hashtags—#IWD2019
#ClimateScience and #BalanceForBetter—that specifically
have good reach into a gender equity and International
Women’s Day audience.
It’s why when we talk about planning for social media, it’s
not all spur of the moment ideas that make the difference.
Sure, some posts can unexpectedly go viral, but it’s a long-
term, well defined social media plan that tends to produce
the best results.
In case you missed it
WMO confirms past 4 years were warmest on record
Send in your news items for the next issue of
BAMOS and share snippets about the latest events
and announcements with the AMOS community.
Email [email protected].
CLEX launches a briefing notes webpage with short policy-
relevant summaries relating to their science
Bureau releases three special climate statements:
• An extreme heatwave on the tropical Queensland
coast
• Widespread heatwaves during December 2018 and
January 2019
• An extended period of heavy rainfall and flooding in
tropical Queensland
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