Spread the word about freshwater mussels’ conservation: Increasing awareness and willingness to support conservation-oriented policies through social media

Research on social media users has examined the immediate effects of popular social networking sites on vote intention, but studies have not to the potential use of these sites in conservation programs. By conducting an online survey, which included a short-term Before-After-Control-Impact experiment, the author noted an overall increase in respondents’ ecological knowledge after exposure to a dissemination campaign. More importantly, exposure to information through social media affected peoples’ willingness to change their vote intention to support conservation-oriented policies. The current study results suggest that key stakeholders in biodiversity conservation (i.e., researchers, managers, and conservationists) adopting an active role to increase biodiversity valuation may lead to a new form of ecological knowledge acquisition in modern societies.