The Australian Academy of Science reports 1.2m Facebook followers, in its annual report released yesterday

This is up from 1m in October (CMM October 5).

Academy accomplishments: Big, but not the biggest achievement – yesterday the Academy’s Facebook page reported 1.5m followers and the Academy’s “Curious” website, “where we publish our science articles and videos for a broad audience,” had 961 000 visitors last year.

What they watched says a great deal about the popular audience for serious science. They liked Sir David Attenborough talking about “civilisation at risk,” and University of Sydney mathematician Nalini Joshi.  A video series on immunisation had 4.2m views.

Why this matters: Science is a hard sell in the social media marketplace, where real research competes for attention with hawkers peddling persiflage. Peter Yates explained how hard in CMM yesterday. But there is a huge audience for serious science that can be reached in ways that were not possible when broadcast and print media set the agenda.

The Academy shows how it is done.