Time Scavengers

Adriane here-

In early November, some of the Time Scavengers team (myself, Jen, Sarah, Maggie, and Kyle) attended the annual Geological Society of America Meeting. This year, the meeting was held in Indianapolis, Indiana; a nice midwestern city that was very walkable with lots of restaurant options (yes, I judge cities based on the quality of their food). In previous posts, we’ve talked about these annual (some being in Canada) and regional conferences and their importance. Here, I want to provide an update on some of the scientific and educational aspects of Time Scavengers that we presented at the meeting. As some of you may know, our site isn’t just an educational website; Jen and I are also using the site as a sort of experiment. Specifically, we want to know how we can best reach a broad audience using social media and social media advertising tools. I’ll tell you about our presentations, and the major findings from each one!

First, Jen gave a wonderful overview talk about the Time Scavengers site. She gave her talk in an educational session, which are not as well-attended as the science sessions in general. Her talk included the story as to how Time Scavengers began and the motivation behind the site, the reason for inviting collaborators to join us on the project, and the purpose of each part of the site (blogs and static informational pages). Since we were at a conference full of other geologists and avocational scientists, we also put out a call for anyone interested to contact us for collaboration (such as writing a blog post). Jen’s talk was well-attended and well-received! The room was packed, and several people took a picture of the contact information slide during Jen’s talk. We also received good feedback from people regarding the talk throughout the conference. The last part of the talk included to images of our posters that Sarah and I were to present later in the week. So having the overview talk first, before the posters were presented, set Sarah and I up quite well.

Sarah was the first to present a poster on her blogs, in which she has used several large and high-quality images to explain the geology of a particular region (see her posts about Acadia National Park and the Bay of Fundy). She compared how these posts engaged readers compared to some of her other posts that were not so image-heavy. To compare these posts (lots of images vs. not so many images), she looked at the number of visitors to the site on the day each blog post was released, as well as the engagement rate of each post (engagement rate= number of interactions/number of people who see the post). Sarah concluded that over time, her image-heavy posts would gain more views and interactions than her posts with less images.

I was the next to present a poster later in the week. The data I presented was related to six advertisement campaigns Jen and I set up on Facebook. The purpose of paid advertisements are to gain a larger following on social media and to reach a wider audience. There are two main types of ads on Facebook: a paid ad, where you create an ad in the Facebook Business Manager site, and a boosted post. A boosted post is a post that is already on social media (that shows up on a page’s timeline), but you pay money for that post to be ‘broadcast’ to a larger audience outside of the page’s followers. Jen and I have experimented with both types of ads, and we have also experimented with using both static images in the ad and short slideshows.

To compare which ads did best, I looked at the number of engagements each ad received (clicks, reactions, shares) and the number of visitors to the site for the period for which the ads ran. I also calculated the engagement rate for each ad. It turns out that the ad with the highest engagement rate was the first ad (boosted post, static image), although this ad did not have the highest number of engagements. What was different about the first ad is that Jen and I shared it into several groups on Facebook (Women in Paleontology, etc.). The ad that gained the most engagements was a 6-second slideshow with images from the site (it was a paid ad). However, this ad had one of the lowest engagement rates, meaning although it was seen by a large number of people, not many of those who saw it interacted with the ad.

I then compared the number of new visitors to the site, the percentage of women and men, and percentage of site visitors by age group during the ad campaigns to the same variables for the entire site. The number of site visitors during ad campaigns didn’t increase substantially, and the percentage of women, men, and site visitors by age group remained relatively the same from the site total. This indicates that our ad campaigns aren’t doing a great job getting new people to visit the site. Instead, the site attracts an audience by releasing new blog posts and content. In our site user data (which shows us the number of visitors to the site on any given day), peaks in users occurs on days where we release new blog posts. So for the Time Scavengers site, maybe paid advertisements aren’t the way for us to build a larger community and reach more people.

To recap, all three of us who presented on Time Scavengers (Jen, Sarah, and I) had great conversations with other people who are also making educational content and work in the realm of science communication. All in all, GSA 2018 was a huge success in terms of sharing science, meeting new people, forming new collaborations, and learning about the cool new things our friends and colleagues have been working on!