Exploring TikTok as an effective platform for geoscience communication

Abstract. With TikTok emerging as one of the most popular social media platforms, there is significant potential for science communicators to capitalize on this success and share their science with a broad, engaged audience. While videos of chemistry and physics experiments are prominent among educational science content on TikTok, videos related to the geosciences are comparatively lacking, as is an analysis of what types of geoscience videos perform well on TikTok. To increase the visibility of the geosciences and geophysics on TikTok and to determine best strategies for effective geoscience communication on the app, we created a TikTok account called “Terra Explore” (@TerraExplore). The Terra Explore account is a joint effort between science communication specialists at UNAVCO, IRIS, and OpenTopography. We produced 48 educational geoscience videos over a four-month period between October 2021 and February 2022. We evaluated the performance of each video based on its reach, engagement, and viewer retention to determine the qualities of a successful video. Our video topics primarily focused on seismology, earthquakes, topography, lidar (light detection and ranging), and GPS (Global Positioning System), in alignment with our organizational missions. Over this time period, our videos garnered over 2 million total views, and our account gained over 12,000 followers. The videos that received the most views received nearly all (~97 %) of their views from the For You page, TikTok’s algorithmic recommendation feed. We found that short videos (< 20 s) had a high viewer retention rate, but they often had a low engagement rate, leading to less overall visibility. Lecture-style videos that were between 40 seconds and two minutes in length had more success in both reach and engagement. Our videos that went the most viral featured content that was related to a recent newsworthy event (e.g., an earthquake) or explaining place-based geology of a recognizable area. Our results highlight the algorithm-driven nature of TikTok, which results in a low barrier to entry and success for new science communication creators.