This post is written by Chef Stephanie Lovegrove Hansen and Kara Estelle-Powers, Digital Director at Science Magazine.

In the most recent SSP Pulse Check, the community weighed in on the way social media is being used and trusted (or neither) in scholarly communications. The insights revealed a complex picture of a time that remains uncertain and very much still evolving. To build on this data, we looked at past community surveys and checked in with some real, live marketers to see what’s changed and what the landscape looks like on the ground.

How the Social Network Has Shifted

In 2023, the SSP MarCom Committee posted the results of an Ask the Community survey about how they were thinking about and deploying social media in the wake of Twitter’s public meltdown. Those responses, combined with a temp check from the Chefs in 2024 and the recent Pulse Check, paint a picture about how the landscape has changed and where it might be headed.

Taken together, the data clearly show the migration we’ve all felt. In 2023, X was still the dominant (if declining) organizational channel (88% active) even as individual use lagged behind LinkedIn (47% vs. 85%). Bluesky was a rounding error then (14% individual, under 5% organizational) with Mastodon and Threads as rising alternatives. But now, only 55% of orgs are still active on X (and only 37% frequently), dropping it to fifth place overall.

Taran Bassan, Social Media & Communications Specialist at Canadian Science Publishing, says: “While many organizations still hold X accounts, they are often inactive and instead redirect page visitors to more active channels. This reflects how quickly changes in platform algorithms, growth potential, and organizational values have required users and organizations to continually assess where audiences remain most engaged.”

Twitter’s collapse left a vacuum, and the 2026 survey shows LinkedIn as the undisputed leader: 64% use it three-plus times a week, and only 5% don’t use it at all. Bluesky has emerged as the ultimate winner in X’s downfall (68% at least some use, now edging out Instagram), while Mastodon and Threads show 97% and 85% non-use respectively, suggesting the community consolidated around one X alternative rather than splitting across several.

Channel Surfing

Behind this data lies myriad conversations, decisions, and evaluations by a marketing team asking a question that gets harder, not easier, each year: which platforms deserve our time? The social media landscape used to be a short list. Now it’s a sprawl of overlapping, unstable, and unevenly measurable spaces, and for many communications and marketing teams in scholarly publishing, the honest answer to “should we be on [platform]?” increasingly comes down to a simple equation — where is the audience, and how much effort does it cost to reach them there?

The considerations we’ve seen in our own organizations include whether our own audience is active on a certain platform and the simple logistical questions of whether that channel integrates with our social scheduling and analytics tools. Audience + resourcing is the equation a lot of social/marketing teams are weighing. For example, Bluesky was a higher effort in the beginning —once it integrated with the big marketing tools, posting cadence for many organizations increased. Meta made it easy to join Threads / Facebook / Instagram through one account, simplifying adoption for the teams running that content. The low level of effort is what keeps many on there, even if payoff isn’t high. Likewise, if posting on X is just another button in your workflow, the barrier to staying is lower. On the flip side, a high level of effort — and a sense that it was a better platform for individuals to communicate on than organizations — kept many organizational accounts off Mastodon.

“Different journals and research communities favor different platforms, making a one-size-fits-all social media strategy less effective,” says Bassan. “We assess each channel based on where a journal’s target audience is active, the level of visibility and engagement within relevant research communities, and whether the account provides meaningful value, and where we can have the greatest impact. As the social media landscape continues to evolve, we have found that being selective and adaptable is more effective than trying to be active everywhere.”

Reddit stands out as one of the more interesting platforms to consider right now, though doing it well is also high effort. Organizations can’t simply publish there, they need to cultivate community, show up in comments, and earn credibility over time, a resourcing commitment most communications teams haven’t been staffed for. It’s still not widely used at an organizational level — it wasn’t even a category in the 2023 survey — but its importance has grown substantially because of its outsized role in how AI and LLM tools surface answers to users. Reddit content increasingly shapes what a chatbot tells someone who asks a scientific question, a very different kind of value than follower counts or engagement rates.

Who’s Speaking, please?

Reddit’s rise in importance highlights other notable shifts in the landscape. Channels like Reddit reward individual, authentic participation far more than institutional posting, making it a better fit for employees engaging as themselves within a community than for an organization posting as a brand. Other channels are also starting to prioritize individual content over organizational both algorithmically and in user behavior.

Despite LinkedIn’s notable rise in the most recent survey (from 86% organizational use in 2023 to 96% in 2026), people describe it as effective but too formal, too career-centric, and missing the casual scholarly discourse Twitter once enabled. Combine that with AI content fatigue over the sameness of many posts and recent algorithm changes that allot company pages ~5% of feed allocation while personal profiles get 65%, and it spells a dramatic shift in how organizations use social media.

For some, that plays out on the organization’s profile. Hum’s Marketing Director Laura Simis says, “LinkedIn is quickly becoming one big bowl of AI-generated mush, and having a distinct, recognizable voice has become a huge competitive advantage. Organizations with an actual personality are going to stand out simply because most of the feed sounds like ChatGPT. One thing social can do better than almost any other channel is remind people there are actual humans behind an organization. In a relationship-driven industry like scholarly publishing, that matters!”

For others, it means expanding the social strategy beyond the organization’s accounts. Meagan Phelan, Communications Director at Science Journals and Publishing, is taking this approach: “The Science family of journals’ strategy on LinkedIn in particular has evolved beyond promoting published research to creating opportunities for our journal leaders to share the thinking behind new initiatives and editorial decisions. Some of our most meaningful conversations have come not just from announcing newly published papers, but from leaders discussing research integrity initiatives like our DataSeer pilot, sharing what authors themselves say about peer review’s value, and highlighting ongoing efforts to recognize scientists, like the BII Prize.”

And these efforts don’t just drive traffic, she says: “These conversations help people understand the values behind the research we publish and science we elevate. As more people discover science through social platforms and AI-powered tools, explaining how trustworthy science is evaluated, communicated, and recognized seems increasingly important.”

Emerging Formats

It’s not just the channels and perspectives that have changed — the formats of social content are unrecognizable from the Tweets of yore.

In the surveys, YouTube’s usage pattern held with low frequent use but high occasional use, reflecting event and webinar content rather than daily posting, but as trends tend to arrive later to the sacred halls of scholarly communication, we’re starting to see that changing in conjunction with the trend toward more organizational personality.

“We have been posting short-form content on the DCL YouTube channel and see those views climbing more quickly than long-form videos,” says Marianne Calilhanna, VP of Marketing at DCL. “That is likely a statement on society’s shorter attention spans, but our YouTube Shorts have been a fun outlet to showcase the company’s personality and be a little more playful.”

And we can’t discuss video without TikTok. TikTok’s growth is smaller in absolute terms — 15% of organizations using it with some frequency in 2026, up from 7% in 2023 — but it’s a trend worth watching. TikTok also maintains a dedicated STEM feed, making it a genuinely useful channel for putting accurate scientific information in front of a younger audience that is otherwise increasingly exposed to misinformation on the same platform. Science, NEJM, and Nature all have accounts, and Pew Research Center data earlier this year highlighted the increasing usage among U.S. adults and how many adults are now regularly getting their news from there. That combination of scale, a built-in science-adjacent feed, and a demographic that badly needs credible sources is a strong argument for scholarly organizations to keep experimenting there, even at low volume.

Fragmentation & Fatigue

The shift caused by the Twitter fiasco not only caused fragmentation in channels (a challenge adding significantly to the workload of you marketing teams), but also brought values and ethics into a conversation that used to only get as heated as “are we still using hashtags, or no?” (NB: no). Discussions started around misinformation and reputational risk:

“Some organizations are considering the reputational risk of being on Twitter/X while misinformation runs more rampant on the platform than they have before.”

“Twitter no longer is a place that reflects our Journals’ values — high standards, truth, civility.”

And the 2026 Pulse Check formalized this concern: majorities reported social media as a net harm for misinformation (51%), blurring evidence and opinion (57%), and exposing the community to harassment (62%).

“Trust is a really hard KPI to measure,” says Laura Simis of Hum. “What social media actually moves is slower and softer. Mapping how likes and shares translate into audience connection isn’t easy to see end-to-end in a dashboard, but it’s one of the most valuable things social media can do.”

This leads us to one of the more striking findings in the most recent survey data: 21% of organizations reported having no formal measurement process for tracking social media success at all. Some of it reflects genuine landscape fragmentation: metrics differ from platform to platform, and some platforms simply don’t offer certain data at all.

But some of it also reflects a deeper shift in how content is consumed. Click-through traffic isn’t the definitive success metric it once was, and the metrics that arguably matter more now (sentiment across comments, the quality of engagement, whether a post is shaping how an audience thinks rather than just whether they clicked) are considerably harder to track consistently. Lou Peck, CEO of the International Bunch, highlighted other shifts in the analytics marketing teams long relied on: “Between GA4 stripping referral headers on mobile in-app clicks and the massive expansion of Dark Social (Slack/Teams/WhatsApp), website sessions no longer paint an accurate picture of engagement.”

Until platforms and measurement tools catch up, that gap between what can be measured and what actually matters isn’t going anywhere.

Marianne Calilhanna, VP Marketing at DCL put this finding in context: “We treat our social channels as one output among many, to support our broader messaging rather than drive it.”

Stay Calm and Post On

In a 2016 Scholarly Kitchen piece on social media use, the vision was rich: scholarly discourse, collaborative idea development, democratized reputation, live conference participation. By 2026, the Pulse Check data shows organizations primarily use social media for brand visibility (65%) and content dissemination (63%) — with community engagement trailing at 38%. For many, it seems that the conversational layer has largely collapsed.

The community went from a single, energetic hub built around genuine scholarly discourse, to a fragmented, resource-intensive, ethically complicated multi-platform landscape where the primary job is visibility rather than connection, and where many of us practitioners are exhausted by the effort.

But as elsewhere in scholarly publishing, change is the only constant. As marketing teams, the best we can do is to stay flexible, resilient, creative, and curious (something that, from our experience, is right in those teams’ strike zones), experimenting and listening to our community as we collectively chart the path forward.