How do social media posts enhance public interest in a citizen science project? Insights from the Bat Monitoring Programme

Abstract

Citizen science has become an essential tool to gather vast amounts of environmental data worldwide. While the power of social media for marketing campaigns is well documented, few studies have focused on optimizing its content in the context of citizen science. Using the Bat Monitoring Programme (BMP) as a model system and based on a 1-year-long dataset, this article investigates how social media content impacts website traffic and different metrics. Social media was an critical tool for attracting new users to the project website, gathering more than 30% of the new users during the study period. Posts including infographics and images of people performed better than bat photos, obtaining twice as many retweets, shares and saves. Our results highlight that infographics and images of people engaging in the project seem to outperform bat images, thus emphasizing social platforms’ promotion of flashy informative visuals and the social influence of other people’s image engagement. Twitter and Instagram’s higher performances were correlated with a higher number of new user visits to the BMP website. Our study exemplifies how quick and robust analyses of public engagement and behavior on social media may offer a comprehensive understanding of the project’s audience, potentially aiding researchers and citizen science project coordinators in optimizing their use of social media and should be widely encouraged.