The blog, Savage Minds Backup, mentions a few specific benefits of Twitter such as:
- Announcing new research, publications, conferences, and discussion
- Community building
- Access to archived conversations
- Personal curation of scholarly materials
- Rapid dissemination
If you are an existing user of Twitter, you will recognize that these benefits take time and are a function of building a group of followers interested in your content. You’ll likely find many Twitter users with similar research interests who will not only be interested in what you are posting, but also help to build your base of followers by retweeting and favoriting what you have to say.
A few LSE
reports provide some excellent information on using social media, such as
Twitter. The report provides six helpful
suggestions about Twitter, which help to improve the effectiveness of your
tweets. These also demonstrate how
Twitter work in combination with other types of communications and social
media.
- Follow others with similar interests
- Promote your Twitter profile on your email signature, business card, blog, presentations, etc.
- For research projects, tweet about progress and not just the completed project
- Point to other materials like presentations at scribd, authorstream, slideshare, etc.
- Use it with blogging to promote blogs and allow others to share your content
- Use it for classes to communicate with students for updates, announcements, etc.
Another resource is Kathrine Linzy’s “Twitter
for Academics”. Along with some of
the other Twitter concepts previously mentioned, a few that she offers include:
- Use Twitter to publicize your work
- Point to other resources (links, tweets, documents, etc.)
- Consider your on-line personality/identity
Your overall process and online strategy help to develop your
professional identity, which means that you should consider whether your
audience will be academics in your discipline or a broader audience. Many
academics choose to keep personal and professional accounts separate due to the
nature of the content and whether it is being used to enhance their
professional identity and academic visibility.
Using other scholarly communications tools such as Mendeley, Google
Scholar Citations, CiteULike, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, LinkedIn, or Facebook
are useful in conjunction with Twitter. Several of these can be used to store
and track your citations which are good ways to share your scholarship. Tracking activity through these platforms is
the basis of “altmetrics” which will be discussed in a later post.
Note: See also How
to Use Twitter for Business (HubSpot). It is directed at business but the
same concepts apply to scholarly communications.
