This has been bugging me for a little while. I was going to do a twitter thread about it. But actually, twitter has been bugging me to. So I thought I might post it to mastodon, but of course no-one will read it there. So I’m going back to the ‘olden days’ and blogging about it. I’m posting it up a few days before #BOPA2024 in the hope that it stirs a few thoughts.
If I happen to have picked your social media post or your poster to comment on, please don’t be offended. They were mostly picked at random from posters in my area of work, that I’ve looked at this weekend, to show what people do that could improve. I could have picked 100’s of other examples. And I’m sure people will reply with examples of mine that are worse.
The scenario
You’ve done a piece of work, you’ve analysed your data and somehow shrunk your data to 3-500 words to submit as an abstract to your flashy conference. Its been accepted. (Well done - remember most conferences are rejecting a proportion of submissions). You’ve hopefully now produced a beautiful poster and had it nicely printed. Its on display at the conference. Your job is done, right?
Displaying your poster
Surely, all you have to do with your poster is pin it to the poster board, stand near it for your allotted time and be ready to answer some questions, guide people through your poster. After-all, that’s why people come to conferences isn’t it. There is nothing else left for you to do, if no-one engages with you and your poster either it is the audience’s fault for not having enough insight to realise how ground breaking your scientific discovery is, or your science was rubbish and you should never present again. Right?
It doesn’t all stop when you display the poster. In-fact, your work is only just beginning! Firstly, who is your real audience. The 200 people who might walk past the poster at your allotted time? The other delegates who have gone for coffee instead? Or everyone in your profession in the world? (OK that sounds a bit scary - but there is a very high chance there are people who are interested in what you’ve done who aren’t at your conference.)
If you are into social media, you’ll know it is very common to post he proverbial “selfie” with your poster. So well done - you’ve shared your poster with the world… haven’t you?
Engaging Social Media - is probably its own Science
Public relations, publicity and whatever you collectively label “influencer” culture as is almost certainly its own science. Major PR departments test different engagement approaches (that’s what they call getting you to spend time thinking about their product) using A versus B analysis in much the same way as “proper” science people might test two drugs against each other to work out what is best. I’m not in any way claiming to be an “influencer” or an expert on Social Media. But there are some things I can tell you are “wrong”. With “wrong” being that they don’t help me to engage with your ‘product’. Your product is your research, your poster and your take home message. I’m hoping by addressing some of what I find hard to engage with, others can learn from other people’s mistakes and improve their own poster engagement.
The Selfie
I’m sure “selfies” are great at facilitating engagement. Your ‘followers’ are scrolling their endless stream of cat pictures and suddenly see a familiar face. They stop. They read that you are at a conference. Great. You’ve got the start of some engagement.
Indeed that sort of thing is what happens as you browse the poster walls at a conference. People stop to look at posters of people they know. Two things then come to mind here: -
If your friends are stopping by, you could have sent them a text with your results;
At least let them look at your poster.
In the @Florez_Lab example above, the presenters are unfortunately in front of the poster. If only they’d stepped aside of the poster like this tweet:
Now you may well say “but I cant read the poster” - but you can usually download the image from the social media platform and zoom it (even on a phone). Here is the same image cropped to just the poster:
That image is just about readable.
While aesthetically, this angled picture is probably far more pleasing to the eye than the harshness of a straight on poster picture, it doesn’t make reading the poster easier:
No-one says you can only post one image. Here is a good example of the aesthetically pleasing and the poster for the interested reader
Since the purpose of my blog is to highlight things that could improve. Shiny posters, reflecting light are hard to read. So if you are on the ball - export a copy of the poster as a “.png” file to your phone from your ‘desktop publishing’ software (OK you all use powerpoint - but it can do it too!). Then when you are tweeting why not simply use that picture with your selfie?
The key message
If you’ve ever followed any of Mike Morrison’s better poster videos, you’ll probably know he is a massive fan of a single take away sentence describing the findings. In @coffeemommy’s tweet above it appears at the top of the third column of text. I’m not sure I know what the words mean - but I cant see that she anywhere tweeted the words:
“Patients, care partners, and community members have contextual knowledge which is not only relevant to the design and development of processes, products and services, but also, through the process of co-creation, these individuals tend to become further involved, motivated, and influenced by the very element they are co-creating.”
Search engines can’t search words on poster pictures (at least, not in a robust and reliable way). So if I search for “co-creation” and “patients” the picture won’t show up.
If @coffeemommy had replied to her selfie with the summary text she would have made her post more searchable and her message more engaging. That said, as she says - she seems to have been kept busy at the poster show so maybe she didn’t need more engagement. However, planned in advance, while writing the poster, she might have spotted the key message was actually quite wordy (too long for a standard 280 character tweet).
The angled tweet from @hafaydeefe above does this very nicely - Two sentences tell me what the poster is about.
The other thing worth considering is ALT text. Introduced as an alternative to showing the picture in circumstances where the picture isn’t rendered - for instance a very slow internet connection, or someone using a screen reader who has visual impairment. ALT text will make the picture far more searchable.
The Posters
I set out to blog about how people use Social Media to engage their posters, not to talk poster design. But, I will re-iterate my desire for people to watch Mike Morrison’s original video. And this is important - watch the video. Learn from the video. Using (abusing) his template, without watching the video may be a worse sin in poster publishing than sticking to the age old scientific poster in three columns format.
White space is crucial to readability
Justification of text is dreadful for readability
Here are some decent attempts to deliver some of what Mike talks about:
We will ignore the fact they are comiting the ‘stand in front of my poster’ sin! I haven’t tried to read their key messages, I suspect they are still too wordy.
@JorgeOct_ has got the selfie thing almost right - only just obstructing his poster. But please @JorgeOct_ - go and re-listen to Mike’s thoughts on white space, margins, text justification etc. I’m not sure if Mike actually mentions it - but underline is another graphics design sin that reduced readability.
In case you’ve not seen Mike’slatest work - you might want to check out his latest video:
He is less an advocate of the bill board and more an advocate of changing the rules these days.
The QR Code
While Mike wasn’t the first person to use a QR code on a poster, they do seem more popular since he promoted it. Mike’s suggestion was that the QR code would actually lead to a whole paper about the poster. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it done.
I like a QR code. At the conference it is absolutely the easiest way to access a ‘hard’ copy of the poster. On Social Media… it is frustrating to say the least - just tag a link in the post!
Depending how you create your QR code, or where you link it to (fig.share is my favourite, ResearchGate is also good) - you can see how often people engage with your poster. You’ll find people interacting months and years later sometimes. I find people locate things on Research Gate more than they maybe do on fig.share. But I post the poster to fig.share as it lets me embargo it and get a DOI for it. I then link the DOI on ResearchGate after the conference.
The Hashtag
Most conferences will have a #hashtag. It goes without saying that your social media post needs to tag that hash tag to be found by interested people. And make sure you get the right hashtag. I don’t think there is a year goes by without me tagging #BOPA23 instead of #BOPA2023 etc.
Tagging others
If you tag other people they usually get notified about your post. That’s a bit like stopping them as they walk past your poster. But there is a good chance they may re-post your post. If you only have 3 followers on twitter, this may well help your work get more noticed. If you are keen to build your social media following, then that probably increases the chances of you picking up some new follows too.
Don’t make your post a hashtag and twitter tag spam. If need be post them as replies. Keep the messages readable.
A bit shy?
I’m British. I’m not sure Social Media quite works for the traditional British introverted sciencey person. We don’t always like to shout about what we’ve done. But you did a thing, and got it accepted by your peers at a conference. You should be proud. But, if you aren’t sure - why not use someone else to promote your work. Just say to them “Hey, I’m not sure I get all this ‘post a selfie’ thing with my poster but I know it helps engagement. I don’t suppose you’d post it to look less contrived”. I’ve done that before with people and it works well in my opinion. In fact, once you realise it might be a thing - you see it happen far more than the selfies:
Tell a story
I tried this last year, and I think it worked well. Its my general approach to presenting anyway, to try and explain the story rather than just present some data.
Oh and when I said “a bit shy” - @chloewaterson88 didn’t seem that shy with this quote tweet of the thread…
Because we were telling a story about HOW we did the analysis as well as why and the results we were able to tag a few people outside of the particular conference sphere we were attending.
The platform
So far, I’ve been talking about twitter. Twitter (I refuse to be an X user!) thinks of its self as a town square. A place where people can openly sharing information. Prior to recent developments it was pretty decent for that. It still is. But you may well have objections about its owner, its politics, its values etc. There are other platforms. I do post some stuff to mastondon - although I have seen far far less engagement and a bit like taking a poster to a conference and no-one talking to you - posting and no engagement is a bit disheartening.
If you don’t want to be on twitter - work out where else is worth you sharing stuff. But remember - someone had to do it first on twitter for it to become a thing. So perhaps you need to be the first and tell others about it?
Prepare in advance
You will be busy at the conference. Do you actually have time to be writing out tweets about your poster and adding ALT text and finding people to tag in. You already know your message. You already have a copy of your poster. Why not key it up to post (twitter lets you schedule posts, as do various other free platforms that link to twitter). Then you can concentrate on the replies.
This always catches me off guard - I will go into my phone an hour after it posted and see 15 notifications having forgotten I’d pre-set it to post at a certain time.
That’s all folks…
Anyway, I hope this is helpful. I hope to see LOTS of social media engagement at #BOPA24 in 12 days time. There are 135 posters. There is less than 2 hours when poster presenters are to be present with their poster - so less than 1 minute per poster. So don’t be surprised if you need to do something to get people to notice your poster.
— Content on this website has been produced with reasonable care. However, errors can occur. Opinions change over time. Code that worked at the time of publication may no longer work. Users of all content from this site do so at their own risk.
Reuse
Copyright
Citation
@misc{polwart2024,
author = {Polwart, Calum},
title = {Engaging with {Social} {Media}},
date = {2024-09-29},
url = {https://www.chemo.org.uk/posts/Engaging_posters.html},
langid = {en}
}