Twitter versus Facebook: November 2016

On Twitter this year we moved to a new cycle of two retweets for each post on the blog.

It was the third for the blog post below that actually caught people’s attention.

Meanwhile on Facebook, I was very pleased to see this was our most popular post.

People can be sniffy about Facebook and social media in general. Among some people there’s a belief that scholarly and popular are opposites. If that’s true then logically you could make a paper more scholarly by making it less popular. The success of this post demolishes that idea. Auxin enhances aluminium-induced citrate exudation through upregulation of GmMATE and activation of the plasma membrane H -ATPase in soybean roots will be free access from October 2017.

The best performing post was a combination of two ideas.

I’d remembered the Compound Interest image had done well on Facebook in June. I’ve also started blogging papers that cite Annals of Botany or AoB PLANTS papers more regularly. I want to do more of this in 2017. In this case, we have an interesting paper (actually book chapter) and the image seemed to go well with it to promote it.

Tomorrow we (probably) finish the series with quite a diverse selection of links. Unless something odd happens in the last few hours of December. The way 2016 has been going we can’t rule this out.