When I walked into the office on the first of September I fired up the laptop and checked my emails and social media accounts. And then I posted…

NEWS: From today I’m @emblorg‘s social media manager. First coffee, who knows what next…

— Laura Howes (@L_Howes) September 1, 2016

As Dan has already described, by the next day, I was already out of date. @EMBLorg was dead, long live @embl. Social media is everywhere and it is fast. I’m here to make sure EMBL is as excellent at social media as it is at science. As with everything we’re going to be trying over the next months, I want the changes I make to be open (hence the blog) and evidence based.

I define social media as channels that afford a two-way interaction with an audience; a way of getting things done. Chatting about a paper on twitter, or collaboratively working on a google doc, or even blogging about what you’re doing in your job (hi!).

A good portion my role is creating and adapting content for each specific network: tweaking content in under 140 characters for Twitter; creating images and graphics to accompany Facebook and Twitter posts; taking and curating photos and videos; coming up with several different versions of posts (since the lifespan of a social media post is so short), and sometimes creating content from scratch specifically for growing a following on social media.

If you follow EMBL social media accounts you might have noticed that we’re posting more. A lot more. Now I’m using data from the last two months to analyse what works best out of that content. My first findings will be the subject of my next blog.

Questions, comments, criticisms? Send them my way. Do you have a social media account related to EMBL or your work? I can’t control everything and I don’t want to, but I do want to make sure we work smart. And whether you have an official EMBL branded account or just a personal one I know there’s a desire to do what we all do effectively. I’ve been thinking of setting up monthly drop-ins, would that be something you’d be interested in? Let me know here, by email, tweet me or find me in the ATC in Heidelberg.