No, Researchers: Your Social Media is Not Automatically 'Public Engagement'
Engaging non-specialists requires a different approach, says a new study
Twitter is a great way for scientists and other researchers to engage the public — at least, that what researchers and research communicators who have used Twitter a lot have always said.
But according to a new study just published in the journal Public Understanding of Science, most tweets by researchers — at least, the 2,800 tweets by communications scholars the study looked at, scholars whom you would think would be eager to demonstrate their chops at public engagement — aren’t meant to generate public engagement and indeed lack many of the qualities that would entice non-specialists to engage with them (like emotions, or humor, or questions, or references to people outside of science). Not surprisingly, engagement (likes and retweets) were low for the tweets studied without these qualities.
When you think about what most researchers post on Twitter (and alternative platforms), you won’t be surprised by any of this. Tweeting by scientists is, by and large, straight-up scholarly PR, linking to their own and others’ scholarly articles without much attempt to make the research friendlier or more relevant to non-specialists.
But science communications has always assumed and implicitly argued that, because the platform could be used to engage the public, the use of it by scientists is de facto increasing public engagement for science in important, healthy ways. The study’s authors nod to the magic of this thinking:
Scientists can, but they do not have to use Twitter for enabling dialogue with nonscientific audiences. Surveys point to the fact that most scientists use Twitter to reach their peers (e.g. Collins et al., 2016). In addition, scientists have often been described as ambivalent regarding public engagement activities, especially with respect to the blurred spaces between internal and external science communication (e.g. Peters, 2013), which is true for Twitter.
Has public engagement by researchers increased in the era of social media? Of course. But what I like about this study is that it starts to tear down some pernicious and widespread assumptions among scholars:
That their scholarly PR on social media is also de facto “public engagement” because it’s done on social media; and
That they don’t have to be clear about whom they are speaking to and what role they are inhabiting in blurred public spaces like Twitter — that they can just “be researchers” or “be scientists” and it will all turn out OK.
No. Truly engaging any portion of “the public” requires the expert to inhabit a different role with a different voice and skill set — if only for a tweet and its follow-up — then those required to be an expert. It requires you to deploy some of the “indicators of engagement,” in the study’s unhappy phrase. It requires you to be more than an expert.
This is why I keep on harping on research experts’ need to embrace the role of “public expert” if they actually want to do business with the public. A public expert understands the different tools and register a social post needs to engage whatever slice of the public they’re targeting. Being a public expert isn’t forgetting how to be an expert. It’s knowing how to translate that expertise to non-specialists who need more than scholarly PR.