Fish Thinkers nine most popular Instagram posts of 2018
At the end of each year we take a quick look back at our blog and social media stats, to see what people were particularly interested in (e.g. see 2017 in review). Here is the 2018 roundup:
Currently Matt is working at his postdoc with Global Finprint in Western Australia & has been off on various wild and wonderful trips (as well as sneaking in his graduation earlier in the year). Evie is getting closer to the end of her masters in Trondheim, Norway and also fitting in the jealousy inspiring field-trips. I am living in Sweden and had my thesis accepted in late 2018. Since then I have been doing bits of freelance work and also recently started working part time at Otlet (a very exciting new sci tech startup that helps scientists find and share biological samples), as head of science communication. Post-docs and/or full-time work are hopefully on the horizon for me (so please do do pass along any opportunities you may come across).
Fish Thinkers Blog
The blog hit close to 45,000 total reads this year, which isn’t too bad for a blog with no funding, that is run by a few post-grads/ECRS. As usual we had quite a few people guest blog about their research during the year and hope to keep this up as a means of plugging new research in an accessible way.
Close to 20,000 blog views in 2018
We had views from 165 countries in total this year! Most visitors came from the United States (by far) which is a first for us and I am not sure what is driving that change. Australia and UK are well represented as usual and then there is a big group of countries behind them with surprisingly high numbers of viewers (see figure below). Still no one from Greenland grrrr!
Some of the more popular blog posts this year were:
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5 free ways around the great paywall of academia. #Updated December 2018#
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Honours and post-grad funding list (for ecology research) Updated!
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When push comes to shove in recreational fisheries compliance, think ‘nudge’
- Using seafloor mapping to help assess marine protected areas
- The devil in the deep: expanding the known habitat of a rare and protected fish
Again, our two most popular blogs this year were not in anyway about fish or even necessarily aquatic research. Plenty of fish in the other popular posts though.
Fish Thinkers Social Media
We have been fairly quite on the Fish Thinkers social media over the last year for various reasons, nevertheless it is going along quite well. On Instagram we now have ~4.8k followers and both twitter and Facebook have ticked over the 1.3k mark this year.
And that, in short, is how Fish Thinkers went online in 2018. Thanks to everyone that read, commented or contributed in 2018—As always we appreciate it greatly! If you (or someone you know) has some interesting research underway then feel free contact us and suggest a guest post for 2019!
Fish Thinkers 