May 1st, 2011.
If you thought social media was a passing fad, then you might be surprised by what our Research and Communications Officer Dr Rachael Dunlop learnt at “Media140”, a science communication and social media conference held in Brisbane recently.
New statistics indicate the number of Australians with Facebook accounts now exceeds 10 million with around 6.6 million checking-in to the popular social media site every day. The largest percentage (28%) of those are aged between 18-25, closely followed by the 26-35s (24%) with the 36-45s not performing too badly either (15%). The split between men and women is also pretty close at 46% versus 54%, respectively. Regarding Twitter, there are approximately 2.5 million accounts in Australia, the majority belonging to older users (only 16% of are aged under 24 years old).
Worldwide, Twitter has 190 million users, tweeting 65 million times a day and Facebook has more than 500 million active users with 50% logging on in any given day.
The full day conference. called Media140 (140 referring to the number of characters you are limited to on twitter) hosted panels, case studies and workshops covering topics such as how to use social media to communicate science, the importance of using social media and how to keep your message intact once it gets out into cyberspace. Speakers included Bernie Hobbs from ABC Science, Natasha Mitchell, presenter of ABC “All In The Mind”, Wilson da Silva, Editor-in-Chief of COSMOS Magazine and Daniel Keogh, science communicator and reporter on ABCs Hungry Beast.
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