A study conducted at the Technion and the CERN center for particle research analyzes the public's response to scientific information on various media platforms
Gone are the days of the ivory tower. Scientific ideas, methods and findings are increasingly being published on different social media platforms, raising questions regarding the nature of the platforms and the differences between them. For example, does a user react differently to the same scientific image that appears on different platforms - Facebook and Twitter, for example?
From a new study conducted at the Technion and CERN - the world's largest center for particle research - it appears that the answer to this question is negative; Similar scientific topics receive similar user engagement on different platforms. "Awesome" images lead to high engagement regardless of the platform - and in some cases even if they are not new. For example, a photo of CERN's dishwasher for printed circuits won the most
From 121,000 views on Facebook, and retweeted more than 1,200 times on Twitter, probably because it was so surprising and entertaining. The same principles that explain the appeal of viral cat videos seem to apply to tweets about subatomic particles.
However, the study found an interesting difference in user engagement rates between the various social networks in which CERN is active. As you might expect, on platforms where CERN has accounts with a large audience, such as the English-language Twitter account that reaches more than a million followers, science-related posts tend to get more shares and clicks. However, user engagement on innovative platforms such as Instagram, where CERN has fewer followers, is relatively high compared to engagement on the larger, older platforms. The explanation may lie in the fact that on new platforms, users who are "early adopters" tend to be more involved followers.
The data is based on a study published this month in the academic journal PLOS ONE, in which user involvement was investigated in items such as posts, tweets, etc. published on the subject of particle physics on various social media platforms: Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram and Twitter. In addition, the researchers examined the characteristics of the items that attracted a particularly large number of user interactions. To do this, they analyzed user interaction rates on nearly identical items uploaded simultaneously on five official CERN social media accounts over an eight-week period in 2014. They tracked a large number of interactions including likes, comments, shares, link clicks, and time spent on the site CERN.
The research was conducted by Kate Calle from CERN together with PhD student Aviv Sharon and Prof. Eilat Baram-Zabari from the Technion. According to them, "To the best of our knowledge, this is the first research description of the public's involvement in relation to science in social media on several platforms at the same time. Although the research focused on particle physics, its findings may serve as a tool for measuring and analyzing social media in other scientific fields as well."
