These days, many nature enthusiasts take to social media to communicate, connect, share, entertain and inspire. Here at GiGL, we’ve been part of this digital community via our online social media platforms for many years. We use our platforms primarily to foster engagement, expand our reach, and to enhance our followers’ understanding of GiGL’s data holdings and our role in London.
As our position is mainly to inform and assist decision making with our robust evidence base, we remain impartial on social media and stick to light-hearted, fun, and fact-based content. We do, however, use our platforms to advocate for our vision as a social enterprise that London’s environment is understood, protected, and improved to benefit the well-being of humans and nature communities alike. Social media can be a powerful way to campaign and support worthy causes and here’s how we put each platform to use.
Head to our social media accounts via the links below to take a further look and give us a follow or like!
Instagram is GiGL’s latest social media account to launch. With its visual appeal, it plays a pivotal role in showcasing London’s vibrant wildlife and parks, encouraging individuals to actively participate in wildlife recording, photography and conservation efforts. We share photos sent to us by enthusiastic species recorders via our online submission forms, as well as photos and infographics from the GiGL team to display our own passion for London’s environment and the data we work with. The platform’s aesthetic nature allows everyone to share cheerful, eye-catching, and easily digestible content to create their very own online nature gallery.
X (or Twitter as it’s still more commonly known), with its succinct messaging, is quick and efficient at sparking conversations and sharing fun facts and snippets of important information. Many users share images and can get a quick response on species identification via this route. Nationally celebrated days and weeks, such as Earth Day (22nd April), Insect Week (24th – 30th June), and recently National Tree Week (25th Nov – 3rd Dec), provide great ways to cooperate and boost participation across the sector.
LinkedIn, being a platform primarily for professionals, enables GiGL to connect to those within our stakeholder organisations. This is a way in which our contacts become our ambassadors; by sharing our posts to their networks they expand our reach and prevalence within different environmental sectors, advocating for what we do. We, like many, tend to share more business-related posts, including updates to our services, how we can assist our community and professional networks, and information on relevant legislation.
Facebook is a community building platform. Our stakeholders use Facebook groups as hubs for their community, recording, or local park groups. Groups are also set up for people with shared interests, especially for taxon groups such as invertebrates, where images are shared for identification. As well as fun posts and images we share to Facebook, it is also helpful for promoting events and sharing information and resources.
If you are part of any of our online networks, we’d be very happy to collaborate with you by sharing or interacting with your posts and would also love to showcase more wildlife photos via our Instagram (with credit to you of course!). Please get in touch with becky.garden@gigl.org.uk if interested in collaboration or sharing your photos with us.
On that note, here’s a GiGL-themed Christmas post to spread the festive cheer to our readers and online community…Merry Christmas!
