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Worried about "preaching to the choir" on her Twitter account, Isabelle Côté, a professor of marine ecology and conservation at Simon Fraser University, analyzed the Twitter followings of over 100 ecology and evolutionary biology faculty at 85 institutions in 11 different countries.
She and collaborator Emily Darling categorized each follower as "inreach" if they were academics, scientists, conservation agencies or donors, or "outreach" if they were science educators, journalists, the general public, politicians or government agencies. They found that accounts with fewer than 1,000 followers primarily reached "inreach" followers, while accounts with over 1,000 followers had a greater mix of "inreach" and "outreach" followers.
But even with a greater diversity of followers, Côté said that there is no guarantee tweets are read or understood.
"There's clearly a lot of room for scientists to build a social media presence and increase their scientific outreach," she said in a press release. "Our results provide scientists with clear evidence that social media can be used as a first step to disseminate scientific messages well beyond the ivory tower."
