The power of pictures. How we can use images to promote and communicate science - BioMed Central blog

"... As Social Media Assistant at BioMed Central, one thing I’ve realised is how vital images are in my role. A post on social media accompanied by an image is 10 times more likely to receive engagement. Visuals are one way of grabbing your audience’s attention and gaining interaction, especially on Facebook. With this in mind, you can use these images to drive users to research. And what if you have limited characters to write with? Twitter only allows users 140 characters of text, which can sometimes make it difficult to convey a complex message. With an image, you can help explain these tough concepts without taking up too much space. Here’s an example ... We are seeing plenty of researchers and institutions taking advantage of images, especially through the microblogging service, Tumblr. Publishers, institutes, researchers, and schools are using Tumblr to promote scientific findings, with the help of vibrant and appealing images. Tumblr is also a great way to bring awareness to the research itself.

There are a selection of brilliant Tumblr blogs for science communication. There’s the Great British Bioscience (BBSRC) blog, providing bite-sized bioscience highlights. You can get your daily dose of biomedical images with the MRC’s Biomedical Picture of the Day (BPoD) blog. Meanwhile, Biocanvas, the blog, unleashes the true beauty of science with dazzling photos that could easily be pieces of artwork. After something more unusual? Try this scientific illustration Tumblr ... At school we are expected to scour our textbooks and memorise sentences word-for-word. This isn’t always the best tactic. Many of us are visual learners, who memorise content more effectively if it happens to be image-based.  This is what makes infographics so popular: they crunch down data and findings and present them in an easy to digest manner.  The images, diagrams, and figures in infographics make the learning process more fluid.  Funnily enough, here’s an infographic explaining why we all love infographics ... Just because you’re not an artist, doesn’t mean you’re banned from doodling. Art and science are not mutually exclusive. Sketching out a diagram, comic strip, or illustration, can help provide yet another channel to explain complex work.  'But I’m terrible at drawing', I hear you say. Well, you don’t have to be a brilliant artist to help get your message across. People appreciate custom content, no matter its quality or its execution, as long as the information is reliable.  Thanks to open access and open data, we are able to construct infographics and custom content with raw information. With all these findings being open to the public, we are able to combine these ingredients and create a visual product that will engage and educate others: another way to put this research to good use ..."