Traditional communication channels are now co-living with new ones, such as social media. These are channels through which communication is fast, impactful and interactive. It’s commonly thought that they are mainly used by young people, but now there is an additional increasingly high demand of reliable and easy to understand information on social media by adults. Scientific research results need hence to be easy to find on these channels by those that are familiar with them but also by those publics that are starting now to approach these channels.
These are the reasons why, in order to provide accurate and reliable information, scientific research institutes need to be able to adopt a communication strategy appropriate for social media. These channels require indeed an approach that is different from the ‘traditional communication’ one, they need to provide information quickly, interactively and they can never be silent, this means that even when scientific institutes are not able to release breaking news they need to provide users of information that is not yet very well known. At INFN, these three requirements have led to the creation of new communication strategies that are based on two concepts: interaction and impact. INFN has created a series of weekly appointments that through an images-storytelling unveil the work that is done daily at the institute. Moreover, it has planned a series of interactive interviews, Facebook lives, that allow the public to directly ask questions to the first actors in the research field.
To reach an increasingly higher public and to meet the new public demands scientific research institutes have hence to be strongly present on these new communication channels, social media.