Social Media for Scientists – What’s Most Popular?

If you haven’t heard of social media by now, you may want to sit down for what we’re going to tell you next: Astronauts have landed on the moon!  We’re at a point where it’s hard to ignore social media – for better or worse.  (When Metamucil has a fanpage on Facebook, it’s clearly getting out of control…)  However, what may be less obvious are the personal and professional implications of using social media for scientists.

With over 400M registered users worldwide, Facebook is the 800-pound gorilla in the room.  However, scattered about the room are a few 400-pound tigers (Twitter, 75M; LinkedIn, 65M; and MySpace, 115M) that are fighting to keep the gorilla in check.  These are the standard bearers – the platforms with the largest audiences and the biggest names.

A huge number of websites dedicated to social media for scientists have emerged over the past few years.  While many of them may be beneficial to our careers as scientists, for the sake of this article, we’ll focus exclusively on the household names.

It’s easy to think that our lives as scientists need only focus on our work.  Traditionally, we’ve been a profession where data is king and results, not the number of Facebook “Friends” we have, advance our careers.  While data will always be the bedrock of research, the world around us is changing – quickly.  As a consequence of that change, we need to make sure that we’re taking steps to stay current.  We don’t want to be the person walking into our job talk wearing a Members Only jacket and Hammer Pants because nobody told us they went out of style 25 years ago…

In our upcoming series on social media for scientists, we’ll be breaking down the largest websites to see how we can leverage them for our personal and professional benefit.  But first, we want to know which of the leading site you’re actively using.  We’ll define an active account as one that you’ve used in the past two months.  (Although Facebook owns FriendFeed, we’ve kept them separate for this survey.)

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