When you log on to your Facebook page every morning, do you often find yourself interested and pleased by an odd and insightful posting in your news feed?
Maybe it’s a video of what life would be like in American suburbs if all of us had to live on the five gallons of water per day per family that is common throughout much of Africa.
Maybe it’s another video from the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment about an undergraduate who has turned 130 years of data on rising global temperatures into a cello composition.
Or it could be a link to the latest local or national news article about water pollution or water sustainability.
If your only connection to the Freshwater Society and the world of information on water that we help dispense is the newsletter you are reading right now, you are missing a lot.
We have social media communication channels you should try out and we’re sure after you’ve tried them, you will want to look for them regularly or subscribe to them.
Deirdre Coleman, Freshwater’s program coordinator , posts three or four links on our Facebook page every week. Almost 1,000 people, who “like” our page, get those postings in their news feeds.
“I love searching/surfing for things to post, from emerging news about freshwater to goofy water videos, to try to engage our diverse social media followers,” Deirdre says.
Deirdre also is Freshwater’s Twitter master, tweeting and re-tweeting 140-character nuggets of information about the latest, the most important – sometimes, just the most fun – developments on water protection and sustainable use.
We’ve currently got about 230 people following Deirdre’s feeds.
Pat Sweeney, Freshwater’s research and communications director, posts two or three items each week to our long-running Water, Science and the Environment blog. Often these blog postings provide links to important research on water, like the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s recent report on nitrogen pollution, or an August 2011 U.S. Geological Survey analysis of nitrate in the Mississippi River.
All of those blog posts are accessible through the “search” function on our web site’s home page.
Pat’s all-time favorite blog posting goes way back to May 2009. It was about a University of Wisconsin contest for songs about invasive species. It’s not often that you come across “curly leaf pond weed” and “Viral Hemorrhagic Septicemia” in the same rockabilly tune.
It’s not exactly social media, but we recently re-designed our web site to make it easier to use on smartphones and tablet computers. You can also download an app for your phone that provides content from our Minnesota Weatherguide Environment Calendar. Jeanne Prok, Program Manager and Editor of the Weatherguide maintains the app with current weather and astronomy information, amazing photos of Minnesota nature accompanied by Jim Gilbert’s Nature Notes and links to some of our favorite news, weather and nature websites, including KARE 11. There’s also a shopping cart where you can purchase the 2014 Weatherguide.
How do you get, and keep getting, all these social media features? It’s easy:
- To get the Facebook postings in your news feed, go to our page and “like” it. It’s that simple.
- For the tweets, go to FreshwaterSoc and “follow” us.
- For the blog, go to our web site and find the blog postings in the drop-down menu at the top of the page or in the postings near the bottom, left of the page. Read one of the postings, then just click on the subscribe electronically link you will find there. The blog postings will be sent to your email inbox.
- Get the smartphone app by going to the link on the right side of our website’s home page or visit an Android or Apple app store- it’s free!
Now, everybody, let’s start humming along to that song about invasives.