6 Scientific Steps To Engaging Posts: Emblems and coffee in the age of information

Do you want to share important information with as many people as possible? To do this, you need to catch people’s attention in a sea of social media information. The good news is that there is a scientific formula of 6 steps that will help you communicate important information with impact and also help push your posts to a wider reach. 

Imagine … 

You’re still on your coffee break and have a few more minutes to go before returning to your desk to work. You scroll through your social media and come across this post on Twitter. 

In Leana Wen’s tweet, the first thing you notice is that she is featured in a CNN video interview that starts playing. You also notice the “Coronavirus Pandemic” headline in red under her talking head and statistics in yellow to her right. Now your interest has been captured, you read the 3 sentences above the video:

1. Summary of the background of the story in her video interview, 
2. Short, punchy conclusion,
3. Short, dramatic recommendation.

You are now curious enough to watch the 60-second video. And after about 2 minutes, you stand up and walk back to your workstation, fully updated on an important recent news piece, with data and an expert’s opinion on it. That is a pretty good return for your 2 minutes of time.

That is the art – and science – of a good tweet on Twitter. We can learn a lot from this format if we want to share an interesting article or research on Linkedin.

The first thing to notice is the visual part of the post. Firstly, it catches people’s attention, and secondly, it can efficiently share information. And if chosen well, it supports the main point in visual form, thus reinforcing the message. 

In Ahmed Elbanna’s tweet below, he attached 3 very clear graphs comparing hospitalization and fatality rates for people who are vaccinated and unvaccinated. 

Like Leana Wen’s tweet above, he packages his message in 3 sentences:

1. The background, or source, of information. 
2. A short and aggressive sentence that powerfully affirms the conclusion that “Vaccines do work!”
3. An interesting caveat or surprising fact. 

Finally, he mentions specific important people in the tweet who may be interested in his message in order to catch their attention. 

Writing to help people stay up-to-date and properly informed

Academics and busy business people turn to social media like Twitter or Linkedin to get interesting and useful information quickly. This is their expectation. They need to stay up-to-date with the current news or research and this often means reading dozens of articles and reports each day. 

Informative social media meets this need, like Twitter and Linkedin. 

So, it is not surprising that Twitter is so successful. Twitter’s limited post length of 280 characters helps people get the main points of news very quickly – at least from the people you trust enough to follow. 

In this way, you can learn something from popular writers and trusted voices who do Twitter-style micro-blogging. They make every word count and get to the point.

When microbloggers find an article or report that has information of value, they quickly summarize and present it in an easy to understand way. Of course, the reason they have posted this information is they realize its importance and hope to use it to change people’s ideas, opinions or beliefs.

Scientists are particularly good at this. The  scientific method is to research, analyze and summarize other people’s research to find holes or gaps that they can fill. Identifying main points and persuasive conclusions is second nature to them. For this reason, you can learn a lot by paying attention to the writing style of successful scientists on social media. 

Let’s use Eric Topol as an example. 

Eric Topol and social media emblems in the age of information

Eric Topol is a physician-scientist, author, editor and a prolific tweeter. In his field of medical research, he is a celebrity and more importantly, a trusted thought leader with over 520,000 followers. Topol has mastered the length limits of Twitter and come up with the most efficient formula to both attract attention, communicate information, and persuade. 

At the most basic level, his tweets are like emblems of the 15th to 17th centuries in Europe: they are “a didactic or moralizing combination of picture and text intended to draw the reader into a self-reflective examination of his or her own life” (Wikipedia. Accessed Sept 12, 2021); or if not an examination of one’s “own life”, then an important social issue. In other words, the image and brief word message on Twitter work together with the aim to teach, persuade or change someone’s ideas on an issue.

Let’s compare a 17th Century book emblem with a 21st Century social media emblem. 

In the 17th Century political emblem, there is the image of a large fish violently eating a small fish with the Latin motto  “The big eat the small” captioned above. 

The 21st Century emblem is a tweet from Eric Topol with a stark graph comparing visualized data of hospitalization and mortality rates for vaccinated and unvaccinated people; his first line is like a motto, “Exhibit 99,999 of #Vaccineswork”. This is not only a conclusion from the graphic data, but also embeds the hashtag for a trending topic in a brief, punchy, humorous jab that reminds those who still do not believe in vaccines that this is one more example on top of a mountain of other research that demonstrates the preventive power of vaccines against Covid19. 

Both emblems share the aim to teach and remind people of a truth. Both use image and language to create a persuasive message that neither image or language alone can achieve.

A  6-step formula to create scientific social media emblems to boost post reach and visibility

A clear, eye-catching and dramatic image is necessary in our attention-driven economy on social media where a post has less than 3 seconds to catch our scrolling attention. 

Unlike the 15th Century emblem book reader who had more time and fewer choices of books, today’s social media surfers need more help to navigate the flood of information and become aware of relevant and trustworthy tweets and posts. So, microbloggers take advantage of tools like mentioning significant others, like @erictopol, and mentioning trending topics with hashtags, like #covid19.

In a 2015 blog article called Tweet like Topol [1], Zhai lists 5 steps to creating an impactful tweet. To this list we can add another visual step (#6) to to create the scientific emblematic-style tweets that Eric Topol has become famous for:

Step 1: give summary or present main take away

Step 2: use graphics from source or another related source (Zhai gives quick and easy tips to combine images into one using the free software Canva)

Step 3: link to publication (use bit.ly to shorten URL to keep within Twitter character limits)

Step 4: @journal and/or author 

Step 5: use 2-3 relevant #s

Step 6: use emoji’s for visual effect and to help stay within a character limit (get emoji is a good source).

Let’s take a look at some of his tweets to get a better appreciation for the economy of his posts.

Example 1: post test + tables and graphs

In this post, the first line briefly sets the background information of 3 CDC reports, and then the next line introduces the theme of the data (benefit of vaccines) and uses emojis to save space and engage readers to puzzle out the meaning (🧵 👇 = thread below). The main description of the relevant statistics and finally the last sentence gives the conclusion or interpretation of the main findings: a 3rd shot for seniors older than 65 years of age is supported. For the person who wants to look closely at the numbers, tables and graphs are also provided from the CDC reports.

Graph 2: post text + image of article with highlighted text     

In this example, Eric Topol adds an image of a highlighted article by Leana Wen. The first thing we see is the article image, highlighted text and headline, which Topol rephrases in his 1 sentence post with a catchy quote from the article, describing the covid plan as a “tepid half measure”. The article link is posted, with a mention of its author (@DrLeanaWen) and newspaper section (@PostOpinions). For people who want to go directly to the source themselves, Topol highlighted the sections he thought were most relevant.

Graph 3: post text + image of article with highlighted text

The final example taken from Eric Topol introducing a new and useful science news source: science.org. The image comes from an editorial from this news source with a number of highlighted sentences. In this first sentence, he introduces the new news platform with its link and mentions the author of the editorial (@hholdenthorp). In his second and last sentence, he lifts a quote from the editorial explaining the reason for this new news platform.

Optimizing your post for algorithms and influence 

The above are good recipes for Twitter, but not for all social media. On Linkedin and Facebook, for example, you should add the links to the original article in a comment below the post. This is because the algorithms that decide who and how many people see your posts do not like links that take the user away from their social media platform.

But the other steps in the 6-step formula to making impactful and informative posts apply. Most social media platforms use hashtags to categorize topics to make them more searchable, and mentioning specific people in your post can draw their attention – as well as their network’s – to your post. Other ways to boost engagement with your post would be to ask a question at the end of your post and learn how to effectively comment on other posts [2].

Brief microblogging posts, if done well like the above examples, offer substantial bite-sized pieces of knowledge that go really well with coffee on a short coffee break. If you carefully choose interesting pieces of information with emblematic image and text combinations, then others will share them and the social media algorithm will push your post to more readers. This is the first step to building your credibility, growing an audience and creating influence. 

References 

[1] Tweet Like Topol – Guide To The Perfect Scientific Tweet (supremeopti.com) 

[2] EFL 7. Writing comments that (net)work! – The Daly Weekly Comm (nigelpdaly.com)