TIME SCAVENGERS: REACHING THE PUBLIC THROUGH SCIENCE BLOGS AND DETERMINING WHAT CONTENT PERFORMS BEST ON SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS

Time Scavengers is an educational online blog and community that explores and explains climate change and evolution through the lens of paleobiology and paleoceanography. Over the past two and a half years, we have grown to include 40 static pages, hundreds of blog posts from contributing authors, and three active social media communities (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram). Blog posts cover a wide range of topics under the headings of ‘Science Byte’, ‘Field Excursions’, ‘Education and Outreach’, ‘Byte of Life’, ‘Paleo and Climate News’, and ‘Meet the Scientist’. Herein, we assess the reach and the popularity of specific blog posts within each of the above six categories on each of these social media platforms.

After a joint website and Twitter page launch in summer 2017, a Facebook page was launched in November 2017, and Instagram followed later in October 2018. All three social media communities are used to promote and advertise the new blog posts as well as boost news from the greater paleobiology and climate/paleoclimate community. By collecting data from these three platforms, Time Scavengers has been able to alter the way posts are shared and advertised on social media to increase their viewing. However, not all posts perform equally well on these three social media platforms. Facebook drives most of the traffic on the website, but the posts themselves reach less people on Facebook when compared to Twitter and Instagram. Here, we examine the effectiveness of each type of blog and their popularity on the different social media platforms.

To date, the website has been viewed by over 83,000 individual users and 80% of those visitors are new, with 20% returning visitors. This indicates that we are reaching new people with each post. By analyzing the popularity of different blogs on each of these three social media sites, we can address how best to reach those communities that may not actively seek out the content we provide but may see it through friends, relatives, or colleagues and engage with it on social media.