As part of Materials Week at the University of Warwick, I was asked to talk about social media and how it is used by scientists (and of course I threw in a bit about how journals use it too). Because it is what I know best, the majority of my talk focused on Twitter, with a side of Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube and blogging. And I figured that the best way to find out the reasons why scientists use Twitter was to ask them, and so…

The response was great (and was kindly Storified by @CrimsonAlkemist). I’m certainly not the first to throw this question out there on Twitter; I know others have done it before and people have also blogged about why they use Twitter too (for example, see this post by @Alexis_Verger). Please do point to other such posts in the comments as well – I imagine there are plenty of others out there.

Anyway, the presentation that I threw together can be found by clicking on the image below; it’s essentially a series of screenshots that I talked around. I think the talk needs refining somewhat, but this is a good place to start and I’ll hone it from here if I give it again in the future… if you wish to use any of the slides yourself, please feel free to do so.