The Science People See on Social Media
At the same time, “Facebook-primary” pages have arisen in a relatively short time and built impressive audiences. This illustrates the degree to which social media have transformed the media landscape, making it easier and cheaper for those with few resources to provide unmediated content and garner followings. For example, a 
In just a few years, the volume of posts produced by this set of science-related pages has grown dramatically, particularly among multiplatform pages. The 15 multiplatform pages doubled their production of posts from roughly 37,000 in 2014 to an estimated 79,000 in 2017 (a 115% increase), though much of the uptick in volume of posts from multiplatform pages stems from just a few accounts.
The profile of these science-related accounts can vary across other social media platforms. To illustrate, Pew Research Center looked at Twitter activity from the same 30 organizations as of January 2018.
While far more adults in the U.S. use Facebook (68%) than Twitter (21%), according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, a handful of science-related pages in this study were comparatively more active on Twitter.
Neil deGrasse Tyson had about 11.4 million Twitter followers as of January 2018, roughly 2.5 times more than his 4 million Facebook followers. He was more active tweeting (493 times in 2017) than he was posting content on Facebook (about 130 times in 2017).
Similarly, Bill Nye was more active on Twitter than on Facebook (253 tweets in 2017, compared with about 84 posts).
Among the multiplatform pages, NASA and Popular Science were about twice as active tweeting than posting Facebook content in 2017. But while NASA had many more followers on Twitter than on Facebook (28.2 million vs. 19.4 million), Popular Science had a smaller user base on Twitter (1.3 million vs. 3.5 million on Facebook).
But several of these pages were less active on Twitter, particularly among the Facebook-primary pages. The list includes Health Digest, David Wolfe, ScienceDump, Hashem Al-Ghaili and Smart is the New Sexy, all of which have had a far less active presence on Twitter than Facebook and had orders of magnitude fewer followers on Twitter.5 Stephen Hawking did not have an official Twitter account; Hashem Al-Ghaili and ScienceDump barely had a presence on Twitter, each with fewer than 5 posts in 2017.
All of the 15 multiplatform pages had a presence on Twitter. Only one in this set tweeted less than 1,000 times in 2017: MythBusters, a page that also posted on Facebook fewer than 500 times in 2017. Some multiplatform pages were less active on Twitter than they were on Facebook, including Animal Planet, BBC Earth and Physics Today.
- Figures for the number of followers come from Facebook's official statistics. In this report, the term “follower” is used interchangeably with the number of users who “like” a page using the thumbs up icon. It's possible these numbers are inflated for some or all of these pages because of automated accounts, known as bots.↩
- This study was conducted prior to Hawking's passing in March 2018.↩
- The estimated number of posts for 2017 was calculated by doubling the number of posts during the first six months of that year. Facebook's public Graph API was missing large portions of data during the final six months of 2017, so precise totals were not available. In their forums in early 2018, Facebook acknowledged problems with the API that resulted in the absence of some posts. Analysis of 2014-2016 posts showed roughly even shares of posts in the first and second half of each calendar year.↩
- Two accounts began posting during this period: Hashem Al-Ghaili's Science Nature Page on July 29, 2015, and Smart is the New Sexy on April 29, 2016.↩
- Due to the differences in activity across social media platforms, the set of 30 popular science-related pages on Facebook omits some of the most popular Twitter accounts from science figures and organizations. For example, Dr. Sanjay Gupta's Twitter account had almost 2.6 million followers as of January 2018, while his Facebook page had only 87,000 page likes.↩
