Exploring the twitterverse

This report reviews findings from two research projects that both investigatedhow online social networks are being leveraged to proliferate information relatedto sustainable agriculture in Scotland. Data was collected from Twitter for oneyear analysed using social network analysis and natural language processing.Results indicate that the following approaches may be useful in increasingbeneficial engagement between farmers, scientists and agriculture stakeholders:1. Scientist and agriculture stakeholders who want to share their researchfindings with the farming community should engage directly with farmersin a way that builds trust with them over time.2. Scientists who want to promote their own research findings can identifyadvocates who will help them reach new audiences, called tweetlaunching.3. Using images and videos of topical subjects will likely help improve thereach and online impact; farmers who share images of their farms andscientists who share publication-quality graphs of their research tend tohave more reach for individual tweets.4. Tweet often. Those who tweet more often tend to have higher number offollowers and impact overall.