Year in Review: Our Learnings & Experiments with Social Media in 2022
Our Twitter and Linkedin presence has grown considerably over the past year. In this blog post, we sum up some of the highlights.
It’s that time of the year again when we spend some time reflecting on our progress. We have come a long way in terms of our media publications, blogging and newsletters. In this piece, we take you through our social media journey, which was filled with experiments and learnings.
For those who may not know, we are present on Twitter and LinkedIn. At the start of the year, we contemplated joining the other two giants — Instagram and Facebook. But after many rounds of discussion, we came to the realisation that it isn’t possible to just dip your toes in the Meta platforms; they need more commitment than we could offer. It seemed silly to be there just because everyone else was, especially since Instagram favours Reels. We haven’t ruled them out though — the coming years will tell!
Along with talk of platform presence came discussions on why we need to be on social media and for whom. The ‘who is our audience’ debate is yet to reach a conclusion but that is something we enjoy — the fluidity of our presence and the healthy debates surrounding it.
So, who is our audience?
For now, we have decided to prioritise existing partners and use social media as a tool to find potential collaborators. We have found that we love shining the spotlight on our partners because they do such amazing work and we wouldn’t exist without one another. In the spirit of collaboration, we look forward to working with more individuals and organisations (drop us an email at csei.collab@atree.org for collaborations).
Our growth
In the last year, we have grown rapidly (by our expectations).
Our Twitter family has grown from about 1,000 followers to about 2,000. And our LinkedIn family has expanded from about 1,000 followers to 5,000.
While we are happy about follower growth, it is our growth in terms of reach and impressions that have made our year. We decided it doesn’t matter if we don’t have large numbers of followers, as long as we are creating some kind of impact on our existing ones. We want to provide quality content to our followers and not fall into certain social media growth traps.
Experimenting with design panels
With that in mind, we began the year experimenting with creative panels. Instead of waiting for the information-saturated world to click on links, we decided to disseminate information through design panels. In February, we put out the first set — Veena Srinivasan’s piece for IDR on ‘Research Needs to Leave the Ivory Towers of Academia’.
We were stunned by how well it was received. We won’t lie, it did give us a bit of a dopamine kick when we saw the analytics. That’s when we decided to turn as many published outputs into panels as possible. This would not have been possible without our designers, Sarayu Neelakantan and Aparna Nambiar.
Expert quotes
To mark World Water Day, we asked a few experts what their top solution to the groundwater crisis in India would be and made illustrated panels. This was our venture into quotes by experts and illustrating people. Since then, we have spoken to over a dozen people to address various issues. The thinking behind this was to have something that was exclusive to social media, something short. While we work with experts on longer format media and blog pieces, this was a way for us to connect with (potential) partners and collaborators, to showcase their work. It has helped us talk about various issues and gain insight into what our audience thinks.
Meet the Team
Once we started illustrating experts for quote panels, we decided it would be a good idea to illustrate the entire team and introduce each person in a ‘quirky’ way. The idea was to go beyond professional biographies listed on the website and help people connect with the team on a personal level.
Hiring posts
What was a small team at the start of the year has grown into something much bigger. Our social media channels have played a big role in getting candidates.
Templatising
While we still debate about how much should be templatised, it has helped us in many situations. The designers get stretched thin with all the creative collaterals on their plate, so having social media templates helps. We hope to play around with templates or add more to our collection.
Hardly anything is absolutely urgent!
Another big decision that we took was to not fall into the trap of putting out content for the sake of it. A majority of our content doesn’t need to go out in a hurry so we decided to plan our social media calendars accordingly. We started spacing out content so that we talk about all aspects of our work consistently.
Sharing is caring
We also decided to not be stingy with our shares or likes. The science communication community is small and it’s essential that we help each other. This is why we share content from fellow organisations.
This has been our overall approach to social media — unhurried, thoughtfully planned, collaborative and informative.
Let us know if you have any feedback at csei.collab@atree.org
