Parallel Session 6: Wednesday 10 April 10:15 - 12:00
With more than 2.5 million followers on Twitter, nearly 700,000 fans on Facebook and more than 350,000 followers on Instagram, CERN has built a large community on social media. But is that enough? We still need to publish engaging posts, publications that speak to our followers, and makes them want to click, enjoy and share. The challenge is how to reach more people while staying true to the Laboratory’s ideals and values.
CERN does not, by choice, have a budget dedicated to promoting social-media content. This can be disabling when it comes to increasing the size of our community, but it represents a major advantage: those who "love" CERN have done so by choice for the quality of our content and not by being caught in the wide mesh of the sponsored content.
With social media today, scientific institutes must work hard to be stronger than Facebook, Twitter or Instagram algorithms. This requires getting closer to the online community by showing more of what we do on a daily basis in our facilities while continuing to make people dream. Content such as Facebook Lives, 360° images and videos, Instagram stories and scientists directly engaging with questions from the community are interesting ways to build engagement.
The objective of this talk is to present CERN's quantitative objectives on social media and to propose alternative indicators for KPIs. Because beyond the numbers, it seems more than important to redefine the criteria for success on social media.
