Onwards and upwards — 50,000 social media followers at the Institute of Cancer Research
Image from Pixabay
It's a completely arbitrary milestone but The Institute of Cancer Research — where I work as the Digital Strategy Manager — has now reached a social media audience of over 50K followers/subscribers!
This milestone — which happened at some point in the last few days — is calculated by combining followers/subscribers across different platforms so while it clearly doesn't represent 50,000 unique individuals, I'm still very happy with reaching this point.
When I started at the ICR (Jan 2016) I estimate that we had 12–14K followers. Back them, I was less diligent at collecting this data; if you don't manually collect it there is no easy way to obtain such historical data. Now I routinely collect data each week (spreadsheets are your friend).
Here's how the top four platforms have changed over time. Facebook and LinkedIn have been battling it out for quite a while but LinkedIn has emerged as the clear victor!
The sudden jump in Twitter followers last year was from a single news story going viral (deservedly so)!
Our other platforms (YouTube, Pinterest, and Apple News) are all in the triple-digit range for followers. However, Apple News is our fastest growing platform (admittedly easier to start from a low base), growing 173% in 2019.
As far as I can tell, we are one of only a few academic science institutions that has created an Apple News channel, and only the second cancer research organisation to have a presence (just search Apple News for 'cancer research' and scroll down to the list of channels to find us!).
Next stop, 100K followers! Though I'll also be happy to see Instagram reach 10K (this is when you unlock the power of adding 'swipe up' links to story posts!).
A couple of recent blog posts I helped write for The Institute of Cancer Research
Sometimes I forget that I have this blog and I can use it to link to other blog posts that I’ve written! In the last month I’ve helped with a couple of Science Talk blog posts at the ICR.
At the start of December I co-wrote a blog post, with Sam Dick, to mark the end of the 100,000 Genomes Project:
And then today, with Rose Wu, I helped put together a new blog post that looks back at some of the exciting things that have happened — in and out of the lab — at the ICR this year:
It’s probably not every year that I’ll get to reference ‘Buckingham Palace’ in a blog post title!
Helping support the first ever LGBT+ STEM Day
Yesterday was LGBT+ STEM Day — the first ever day to celebrate and highlight the role of LGBT+ people working in the field of science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM).
In my role as Digital Strategy Manager at The Institute of Cancer Research, it was great to be able to focus all of our social media output on this topic. I'm proud that the ICR is really committed to equality in the workplace.
It was particularly fun to be able to rebrand our social media avatars and banners:
I really enjoyed the opportunity to make a 'videographics' which played around a little more with the ICR's logo. The five coloured bars in the ICR's logo are spaced according to the Fibonacci series. There are, of course, six colours in the Pride rainbow…
New blog — Feeling engaged? — for matters relating to website metrics and social media
As I am now a professional science communicator and as I spend a lot of my time looking at trends and developments in website metrics and social media, I thought that maybe I should have a separate blog for any ideas I have.
There are only two posts so far, and I can't guarantee that I will post here very frequently:
Interviewed by Front Line Genomics for 'The Short Read'
For the second time in my life I am flattered to say that I have been interviewed by Front Line Genomics. The last time this happened was when I was a scientist…this time I feature in their 'The Short Read' segment where I provide some answers about what I'm up to now at the The Institute of Cancer Research.
Read the interview online:
I've finally written a blog post for the ICR!
Graffiti wall at the Festival of the Genomics
I'm not quite sure why it has taken me just over a year at The Institute of Cancer Research before writing a post for the Science Talk blog, but that's what happened.
This blog post is all about my experiences at the recent Festival of Genomics conference in London, organised by Front Line Genomics — who once featured me in their magazine. It felt fitting to write about something so closely aligned to my previous life as a genomics researcher.
Anyway, here is my blog post if you are interested…I hope it won't take me a year before writing another one!