Practical resources for online science content producers

If you’re creating quick educational social media content, there’s probably something in this rather poorly organised collection of resources and tidbits that will come in handy.

Creating content on your phone

• This, from at Tom Whitwell at Fluxx, is a great overview of general advice for filming on your mobile — essential reading.
• Pay particular attention to the advice to not neglect audio (unless your video isn’t going to have any at all)! You can get excellent lapel mics that connect to your phone, or if your budget is exactly £0 and you’re filming at a loud conference or train station (or over a fume cupboard!) etc, try to borrow one of the standard headphone sets that comes with every iPhone, and use its built-in microphone as a lapel mic. It makes an amazing difference, although it does mean you have to be quite close to your subject. They’re also great if you’re shooting simple stop motion on your phone or have a delicate setup as you can take photos without tapping the screen. Makes a huge difference.
• I’m a believer in using the native programs to their full potential rather than hoping that extra apps will magically improve your shots, but here is a list of apps to add some jazz to your videos.
• And if you’re filming detailed experiments for social media, watch some recipe videos on Facebook for inspiration first — they’re not so different!
• A clamp stand or mug can hold your phone just fine — you don’t necessarily need a fancy stand.
• And don’t underestimate the use of a selfie stick! Shooting an experiment you can’t stand too close to? Want a cinematic crane shot but don’t have a crane or a drone? An interesting ‘push-through’ shot? Do it all with a selfie stick, just 99p from that dodgy phone shop/newsagent down the road.

Resources for design and image creation

• Try to use stock images sparingly, but when you’ve looked through Wikimedia, Flickr’s CC search, the CC search, and Wellcome and come up with nothing, these have reliable high quality (if somewhat generic), CC0 (ie no restriction) images: Pexels, Stock Snap and many others on this list.
• Struggling to find tech-related photos that aren’t all white men? This free gallery from Women of Colour in Tech can help, and Colorstock (£) is also addressing the lack of diversity in stock photos. There’s CreateHER, too, which has a mix of free and paid images.
• And for stock video, spend some time getting to know your way around https://archive.org/, as it has so much to offer. Also, research footage is a dramatically under-used resource, I think, albeit a little hard to discover. But keep an eye out for videos in the supplementary information of papers (especially open access ones), and research group pages or twitter profiles. There’s a real opportunity to unearth some gold here, and scientists tend to be very happy to let you use their footage if they can. The BBC has unleashed a great audio archive on the world too.
• For quickly resizing images for social, try Landscape.
• For quick and easy graphics, Canva is worth a try. And if you’re a charity, you can get the premium version for free!
• I’m sure you can generally stick to your brand guidelines for colour choices, but when you need to branch out this gallery of colour schemes from Adobe is useful, and will help you resist the temptation to keep adding more and more colours.
• If you dabble in infographics or dataviz, have a read of this article on selecting colour schemes for your visualisations, and this interactive picker. And if you’re not sure which charts to be using, this poster from the FT is a good starting point. If you’re a bit more advanced and into coding & interactives, the Times have opened up some of their visualisations code.

Miscellaneous management, techniques and theory

• Facebook Live is a tricky subject, so rather than try to dish out advice myself, here are three excellent resources worth a read. I’d encourage you to consider exactly what you’re hoping to achieve (other than just ‘some views because Facebook have been favouring lives lately’), and planning your session around that. Hazel Saunderson shares what they’ve learnt about Facebook Live at National Museums Scotland, NPR share their guide, and Sprout Social share their tips.
• Evaluation templates: Have a read of my take on what metrics are worth focussing on, but if you’d like a starting point for overall monitoring, try these two resources from the TATE: A social media strategy balanced scorecard, and the digital metrics monitoring template.
• If you’re interested in helping scientists connect with public on social media (subtly but significantly different to what this project centres on), have a read of Heather Doran’s report, Connecting scientists and the public in online dialogues about science.
• Want to know what social media hashtags are coming up, and to plan your social activity better? Nabbed from a thread in the Museum Social Media Managers’ Facebook community: Sprout have a 2018 calendar here, you can get emails from National Day Calendar or CheckIDay, and here’s another 2018 one.
• Charity Comms have loads of useful resources for the digital comms part of your role: start here.
• The Open Notebook is an incredible resource for anyone interested in telling science stories online. Spend some real time here, and learn from some of the very best.
• It’s absolutely worth following the industry social media blogs — place like Sprout run a good one with lots of general practical advice. The very best place to subscribe to, though, is Nieman Lab. They have a particular focus on journalism, but their insights into online culture and trends are a level above.
• If you’re interested in visual communication from a slightly more academic slant, this paper on comics in scicomm is interesting.

I plan to expand this page as time goes on, so if you have resources or tips to add, let me know!

This post forms part of the publication, ‘Communicating Science with Social Media’, which is the product of a 2017 Winston Churchill Fellowship. Read more about the project here, and for more about me, including examples of my own work, visit anthony-lewis.com.