Hashtag Savanna Science Network Meeting – taking #ssnm from Skukuza to the world
Twitter can be a very useful platform to share conference proceedings with a wider audience all around the world #spreadthescience
The global Covid-19 pandemic has drastically changed the way we engage and interact with one another, both personally with family and friends as well as professionally with fellow scientists, managers and academics. The last in-person Savanna Science Network Meeting (SSNM) conference was hosted in March 2020. This was just before most countries went into “hard lockdown”. During this time, there wasn’t much travelling, and as a result, the 2021 SSNM did not take place. As things started to ease up in 2022, we took advantage and hosted another in-person meeting, with 155 delegates attending in person. This was slightly less than the 2020 meeting (210 in-person delegates), but what made the 2022 SSNM conference so special was that we also live-streamed the entire conference for the first time. This was done via YouTube while we simultaneously continued engaging and sharing on our Twitter account @SSNM_KNP.
So how successful was the uptake of these online tools? Well, according to Twitter stats collected during the period of the conference, we had nearly 8000 profile visits and 23900 tweet impressions (i.e. the number of times tweets have been seen on someone’s newsfeed). The best news of all is that we now have over 500 followers!
Our most popular Tweet was the one on Species of Special Concern with 1424 impressions:
We require your research assistance for some of our Species of Special Concern (pictured) in @SANParksKNP #SSNM pic.twitter.com/E1Ta4CviFV
— SavannaScienceNM (@SSNM_KNP) March 8, 2022
Another Tweet which had the most mentions (111 Engagements) was by an attending delegate, Enrico Di Minin, commenting on how nice (and strange) it was to be attending a conference in person.
First in person conference after a long long time. Feels good and strange at the same time. Presenting later on today @SSNM_KNP pic.twitter.com/duV6iifjoF
— Enrico Di Minin (@EnTembo) March 7, 2022
So far we have had ~2500 views on the YouTube channels, and counting. Since this was the first year we tried this out, it was only a one-way feed, meaning that there was little interaction outside of the comments sections.
Live-streaming and live tweeting the event enabled us to reach a much wider audience including those who usually attend in person but were unable to do so this time around. We look forward to the hybrid approach helping us to #Spreadthescience.
This article was originally published in the 2021/2022 Research Report.
