Picture That! a Social Media Approach for Communicating Pro-Environmental Behaviour

With a social media- and peer education-approach the European project „useITsmartly“ aims at building a community of young people to not only share knowledge about energy saving, but moreover change behaviour and adopt a sustainable lifestyle. For achieving this aim, the transdiciplinary project unites educators, researchers and young people developing together innovative and target group specific communication strategies on pro-environmental behaviour exemplified by green use of ICT.  

Facebook and Twitter are social media which can be used classically to enhance a public understanding of science. But besides communicating ideas about energy saving behaviour and promoting a “green lifestyle” the unique possibility of social media is the connection to others. Other projects, initiatives, interest groups can be used as multiplicators, like young people, who spread posts and pictures which are relevant to them. These two media channels can use videos and pictures, and have also the possibility of adding text and explain further details or include a link to another source of information.

However, knowledge is not everything. To know what is right, does not mean to act right. That is why beside Facebook and Twitter also an Instagram account has been set up for the project. This is a social media platform, where people only share, like and comment on pictures. With a hashtag (#) system like on Twitter metadata can be created on each and every photo very easily (like key words). By using hashtags the respective photo belongs to a sub-community of pictures from all over the world, which have one thing in common: the same topic (for instance #recycling).

In our presentation we will present findings from our on-going project evaluation, comprising statistics from the social media channels as well discussing possibilities and limits of social media in the scope of a project like useITsmartly.