How to Start Science Communication With One Paper and No Audience

lt an audience for their research started from zero. Mark Rober’s first YouTube video got 4,000 views. Kurzgesagt’s earliest videos sat unwatched for months. The researchers who now reach millions did not begin there. They began exactly where you are: one finding, one platform, and no guarantee that anyone would care. The difference between the researchers who built audiences and those who didn’t is not talent, not institutional support, and not especially interesting research. It is the decision to post once, see what happened, and do it again.

For a BINUS lecturer approaching science communication for the first time, the barrier is almost never technological. The tools are free, the format is short, and the instructions exist. The real barrier is psychological: the fear that the first post will be seen and judged by colleagues, misunderstood by students, or simply ignored by everyone. All three of those things may happen. None of them are reasons not to start. The first post is not a performance review. It is a draft. It counts toward your #binusresearchpoint KPI target the moment it goes up, regardless of how many people see it.

Here is the complete workflow for a first post, stripped to its minimum viable form. Step one: open your EPDP and find one published paper you wrote in the last two years. Not your best one, not your most complex one — just one that you can state the main finding of in a single sentence. Step two: open the AI prompt tool on the BINUS Science Communication page, paste in your abstract, and generate a plain-language summary of what you found and why it matters. Read it once, correct any factual error the AI introduced, and keep it to three or four sentences. Step three: open Canva, select any of the free Instagram carousel templates, and put one sentence per slide across four slides — the finding, the evidence, the implication, and a closing line with your name and BINUS affiliation. Step four: post it to Instagram with the hashtags #binusresearchpoint and your research area. Step five: submit the post URL to your Research Coordinator for KPI documentation.

That is it. From paper to posted carousel, the process above takes between 30 and 45 minutes for a first-time user and less than 20 minutes once you have done it twice. The Weizmann Institute’s Davidson science education program documented in a 2020 PLOS ONE study that scientists trained in this kind of accessible, structured public communication produced content that performed comparably to professionally written science journalism in terms of audience engagement. The skill is learnable quickly. The first post is where the learning starts.

The question of audience size deserves a direct answer, because it is the one that stops most first-timers. You do not need followers to start. The #binusresearchpoint hashtag functions as a discovery feed — your post enters it the moment it is published, and it becomes findable by anyone searching for BINUS research on Instagram, regardless of whether they follow you. Your audience on the first post is not your personal follower count. It is everyone who interacts with the BINUS research ecosystem across all platforms and channels. That ecosystem is already substantial. Your first post joins it, not starts it.

RTT runs quarterly SciCom workshops specifically designed for first-timers, including a live carousel-building session where you walk out with a finished, posted piece of content. If the solo workflow above feels daunting, the workshop is the alternative — same outcome, supported process. The Downstreaming team can also review drafts before posting for any lecturer who wants a second set of eyes before going public.

For the full workflow, AI prompts, Canva templates, and reporting instructions that make your first post as simple as possible, visit the BINUS Science Communication page at binus.ac.id/techtransfer/science-communication.

 

 

 

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