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SOCIAL MEDIA Figure 1. The Christmas day “hot chocolate effect” tweet from the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) that had a high amount of engagement between the public and ASA members. is to post a link to a recent publication four times in two weeks after publication (Springer Nature, 2022). The ASA accounts practice repetition posting the same article multiple times over a few months. In the authors’ experience, each repost of an article generates a larger number of responses. Promoting Research Another social media initiative of the ASA promotes pop- ular acoustics articles at relevant times throughout the year. One of the most engaging ASA social media posts from the past year was on Christmas Day 2021 when the Society posted on Twitter a link to a lay-language paper regarding the “hot chocolate effect” from the 143rd ASA meeting (see tinyurl.com/53ypbz94) (Figure 1). A few people posted questions about the acoustics described in the paper, and there was a cheerful discussion about it among ASA members. Finding Answers In addition to increasing the impact of acoustic publi- cations, social media is a practical way to quickly find answers to specific acoustic questions. Many ASA mem- bers are used to searching the articles of the Society publications, but simply asking the acoustic community a question can be faster for when a web search does not turn up a quick answer. For example, these authors discussed possibly increasing public involvement in acoustics by creating an app that measures and reports on the sound levels of public spaces. We later came across such an app, SoundPrint (see soundprint.co), discussed in ASA YouTube videos and Twitter posts. This shows both the remarkable breadth of acoustic information that exists across the ASA websites and social media accounts and the challenges of find- ing relevant information. The same information could have been found by asking a question that included the hashtag #acoustics and the ASA with @acousticsorg, which would have the additional effect of revitalizing a past discussion to the interest of a wider audience. Resources for Specialized Problems The acoustics Twitter community is active and helpful, making it a good resource for specialized problems. One author was working on an acoustic calculation in a new programming language and tweeted about having dif- ficulty. Another member of the Society sent a script to perform the calculation, which led to the quick iden- tification of syntax errors and a rapid completion of the project. Similarly, many researchers already use social media to find answers to specialized questions, often visiting ques- tion-and-answer forums, such as Stack Exchange (see stackexchange.com) and Reddit (see reddit.com), linked from web searches. These solutions can be both technical and detailed and point to journal articles for complete method descriptions. Reddit already has several active acoustics forums such as r/Acoustics and r/bioacoustics, which feature numerous posts from ASA members that reference ASA publications. Stack Exchange, often more visible in web search results, has a rigorous process for creating specific forums of discussion. The bioacoustics community has recently begun to start a Stack Exchange, the first in acoustics, which will give it a distinct and 80 Acoustics Today • Summer 2022