Gostou desse post? A divulgação científica no Instagram: um estudo de caso do perfil @labplancton_ufc

Abstract

Science trend to move away from the public domain, restricted to a small portion of the population, and not reaching the general public. Thus, scientific dissemination has a fundamental role, as it aims to democratize science by establishing ideal conditions for scientific literacy. Online social networks such as Instagram have proved to be great allies in scientific dissemination, as they have a high power of communication and interaction, facilitating dialogue between science and society. Using social networks for scientific dissemination is very important, and based on it, this work objective was to characterize the profile of followers and their interaction with publications and identify the strategies used in posts with the highest interactions numbers from @labplancton_ufc to understand what may have affected its success with the public. The data analysis base was the profile audience (location, gender, age group) and published content's metrics (insights), such as reach, likes, comments, and saves. Thus, this research was characterized as qualitative-quantitative, exploratory, and a case study. Of eighty posts, twenty-four (30%) have randomly selected for descriptive analysis based on the absolute and relative values of the publications metrics. Based on these data, the six posts that stood out in at least four metrics with above-average values were selected, those with the highest number of interactions. These six posts were analyzed concerning the strategies used for their production, such as the theme, audiovisual resources, language, organization, and amount of information (short/long texts). Results showed that most of the profile public is in Brazil (90.4%), in the city of Fortaleza (35.3%), they are female (58.9%), aged between 25 and 34 years (36.4%). In addition, the posts managed to reach a high number of people where they could see and interact, mainly through likes, followed by shares, saves, and comments. Video posts in the Reels format excelled across all metrics, especially reach. Instagram posts within the News and General Theme have highlighted likes, shares, and saves. In conclusion, short videos and posts with images and animations accompanied by succinct text with simple and didactic language, which relate to people's daily lives, can contribute to effective scientific dissemination on Instagram.