Team:Manchester/socialtest

In addition to reaching out to people based locally and across the country, we wanted to communicate with people on a global scale. To achieve this; we utilised Facebook and Twitter to reach fellow iGEM teams, friends, family and indeed anybody who is interested in what we had to say! We posted news articles, updates on our progress, and pictures of team members sleeping (though they weren’t too happy about that!).

So, did we achieve our goal of gaining a wider audience? The answer is yes! In total, we gained 165 likes on Facebook, and 136 followers on Twitter. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of people who liked us on Facebook were based in the UK, but we also had plenty of ‘likes’ from people all across the globe. As you can see, there was interest in the parts of the world that would be affected by these issues, such as Malaysia and Indonesia

On a number of occasions, however, our posts were not restricted to just those who like or follow us. Shares or retweets gave a degree of virality to some of our posts, resulting in our project announcement being seen by nearly 2000 people! The graph below shows how many people each of our posts reached over the course of the summer.

You can what we got up to on Facebook here or on Twitter here