Salma Patel has been on a whistle-stop tour of academic social media channels. Here she shares her simple, practical tips for academics who want to start engaging with the wider world through social media.
Question:
I’m an academic and desperately need an online presence because I want to start engaging with the public and disseminate my research online - where do I start?
Answer:
1. LinkedIn: Create a LinkedIn profile. This is really easy to do and doesn’t require you to talk to anyone.
- Register an account and fill in your details.
- LinkedIn allows you to search through your mail to find any if your contacts on LinkedIn. Connect to all those that come up.
2. Academia: Create an academia.edu profile. This again is very straight forward to do, and doesn’t require any specialist skills.
3. Twitter: Once you’ve created a LinkedIn and Academia.edu profile, let’s move to Twitter. Twitter will require more work, patience and a sense of humour. You can start off by either attending a twitter workshop/social network surgery, asking a friend/colleague to quickly show you how twitter works or you can read this LSE guide to twitter.
- Create a twitter account using your real name.
- Twitter will ask you to place a very short profile of yourself. You can either keep it really simple [Job Title at Uni of X] or make it more quirky. Don’t worry too much about this at this stage (you can change it later), but what will really help is to have a nosey around other academics on twitter.
- Start following people on twitter. Again you can find followers using your email address. Another really good way to find followers is to find someone on twitter who has very similar academic interests to you. Now look through who that person is following, and follow those people.
- Once you start following people, they are normally alerted and they may start following you back if your profile looks interesting to them (so make it interesting). Also place a few interesting tweets out before you start following people that don’t know you personally.
- The key to getting followers on twitter is to Engage! Start talking to people, if you see a tweet of interest reply to it. If you see a conversation going in between two people, butt in and join in (as far as I know it isn’t rude in the twitter world to do that). When you are starting off this may be difficult to do, but it is not difficult to help people. If someone asks something, take those extra few minutes out from your busy schedule and help them. Trust me, you will see a return.
- Another really quick way to get followers is to take part in twitter chats (twitter chat schedule). There may not be twitter chats in your area of research (not to worry, you can always consider starting off your own chat in the future), but you can always take part in #phdchat which runs every Wednesday evening at 7pm
- What shall I tweet about? Have a look at this prezi or article which looks at 1o ways researchers use twitter. Then have a look at what other academics are tweeting about on twitter, and if you are really stuck put your name down for this online webcast.
4. Blogging: Once you have familiarised yourself with Twitter and have plenty more to talk about, you can think about blogging. With blogging there are a few practical things to consider:
1. Blog name: The name of the blog depends on what you plan to blog about. If you plan to blog about a specific area, then you could keep your blog’s name related to that. If you plan to blog about a multitude of themes, you could have a made up name or you could name your blog/website by your own name, and as well placing your profile on there, you could place your blog on there too. I have seen academics do both.
Please note: If you have a very common name, and really want to be at the top of Google ranking (number one) when someone searchers your name, you may want to consider keeping your blog name your own name. If you have name that isn’t as common and you blog regularly on a theme based blog, you may still come at the top of Google when searched by your name.
2. Where do I blog? You could blog on an already existing blog (such as at your university or a research group) or you could start your own blog.
For your own blog, if you want to set it up yourself then you have two options. You can blog on wordpress/blogspot or any other blog provider (maybe even an internal university blog provider). For WordPress (the most popular), register an account on wordpress.com and start blogging. Your blog website will be: [name selected].wordpress.com
The disadvantage of using this is there is a limit to how far you can customize and there are also a limited amount of themes you can use. If you have some time I would recommend using wordpress to power your own website, and very simply this is how you would do it:
- Purchase your own website name and hosting. This will cost between £10-£20 a year if you have a good look around. You can check here whether the domain name you are thinking of is available here. After you have found your domain name purchase your domain name and hosting from a hosting provider, but please ensure they support wordpress as it will make your life easier.
- Install wordpress on your website.
- Find a wordpress theme that you like. You can either buy one or find a free one. Use Google to find one.
- Setup an about page for your own profile and meanwhile have a good look around other academic’s blog/websites.
- Once it is all setup start blogging and spreading your posts through Twitter and LinkedIn!
5. Other Engagement Tools
There are other platforms you can use to help you engage, such as curation tools. I would recommend you start using them once you have at least 1-3 setup. To quote from a recently published article on this blog:
Curation and sharing of content
Curation and sharing platforms such as Delicious, SlideShare, Pinterest, Scoop.it, Pearltrees, Bundlr, Paper.li and Storify, as well as referencing tools such as Mendeley, Citeulike and Zotero, allow academics to easily gather and present information and, importantly, to then make the information public and share it with others online. On SlideShare you can share your Powerpoint presentations and the referencing tools allow you to gather lists of references on specific topics and then share these with others. Several of these tools, including Pinterest, Bundlr and Storify, allow you to insert your own comments or analysis on the material you have gathered.
Don’t be afraid to try out new platforms and ditch them if they don’t work for you.
6. A few other specific things you could do to get a stronger online presence and get some followers.
1. Contribute to an existing blog in your field. An example is this Impact of Social Sciences Blog, The Guardian Higher Education Network, or if those seem too time consuming or you feel you can’t contribute much to those areas, you can write your quick viva story for PhD Viva and other such websites.
2. Take part in #phdchat. You’ll definitely get some followers and plus as a supervisor/academic/ex-PhD student, PhD students will really appreciate your presence, advice and contribution.
3. Contribute as a panelist to the Guardian Higher Education Live Chats (they normally run on a Friday afternoon). They normally recruit through their twitter account or drop them an email.
Note: This article gives the views of the author(s), and not the position of the Impact of Social Sciences blog, nor of the London School of Economics.
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You’re right to highlight the importance of LinkedIn, Academia.edu and Twitter. But in addition to signing up for these service, there are some simple approaches you can use to maximise the benefits they can provide.
In a recent paper which asked Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories? Jenny Delassalle and myself describe how including links to your papers in your institutional repository from such services can help to increase the visibility of the papers (and, indeed, your repository) to search engine such as Google.
In addition, make sure that you have a link in your Twitter biography to a resource which says something about you and your interests. As I described in posts entitled 5,000 Tweets On and You Have 5 Seconds to Make an Impression! responding to a tweet led to me reading the sender’s Twitter biography and following a link to her blog.This led to a joint paper, which won an award for the best paper at an international conference held in the US
Hi Brian,
Thank you for the tips. I agree 100%, academics, use your online presence to disseminate your research!
Salma
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The thing I find frustrating about twitter is keeping up with everyone I follow.do you have any advice on that?
Hi Louise,
Lists are my tool of choice. If you’ve not seen them, Twitter has a short guide:
https://support.twitter.com/articles/76460-how-to-use-twitter-lists
When I move away from Twitter or have far too much to catch up with, I have set up Lists with varying numbers of people. For instance, I have a list for essential viewing (around 50 people), a list for catching up (around 200 people), a list of institutions and think-tanks and organisations, and a list of 500 (the maximum number you can have in a list) that I use when I don’t want the full force of my feed taking up all my time.
The other great thing about lists is that other people create public ones too, so you may find relevant lists on your travels. I subscribe to a few and, while I don’t use them much, they come in valuable when I have a specific reason to check them.
There are many different ways to keep up. They usually involve not truly keeping up. But that’s like trying to read every book in existence or listening to every song recorded. It’s just not going to happen!
So the best way to keep up is to limit what you read and have lists of the most relevant and/or necessary for your wants and needs.
Hi Louise,
Great question!
I agree with Martin regarding Twitter Lists, they are a really useful way to keep up with tweets that are most important to you. I don’t personally use them (though I probably should), but I can see how they could work very well.
The other thing you could do is go through the list of people you follow and un-follow all the people you don’t really ‘need’ to follow. A couple of months ago I was forced to do this, and cut down around 500 people. It was sad but as with all things you have to prioritise, and it can be overwhelming and sometimes of little benefit when your brain is faced with too much information (it then probably digests very little).
There are some days where I just don’t log on to Twitter, and in those days especially, the twitter stories email alert is really handy, and keeps me up to date with a few stories and tweets that have been tweeted out the most by my followers. So you may want to subscribe to that if you haven’t already done so
The other thing you could do is follow a #hashtag. I tend to catch up the #nhssm on a weekly basis in case I’ve missed something (as its related to my research interests). Or if you know someone in your field/interest area who tweets regularly, just read through their tweets every couple of days and hopefully that way you haven’t missed anything too important.
I hope that helps and enjoy tweeting!
All the best,
Salma
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1. Keep your own institutional web page up to date, for goodness sake. People are so bad at it that it’s the butt of jokes: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1487
2. I’ve yet to meet anyone who has gotten much out of LinkedIn besides a full email inbox of spam-like announcements.
3. Academia.edu ain’t done much for me, either.
4. Google Plus is worth a look. It’s not the ghost town it’s often reported to be.
5. Lousie Daniel: Don’t feel obliged to catch every tweet of the people you follow on Twitter. There is a lot of redundancy, with certain stories “making the rounds” on any given day, so to speak. Dipping your toe in from time to time can work fine.
6. Other possibilities: YouTube channels, podcasts, etc.
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Quite shocking that this list does not include a personal website or somehow hides it behind the blog.
IMHO, point #4 on blogging should come first and be flipped in its approach: it’s a personal website with a blog, not a blog you can use as a website too.
Brian Kelly and Zen Faulkes speak about keeping your institutional web page up to date. Nothing against it, unless it is not your place, but someone else’s.
I sincerely believe that what we do, what we are, must be centralized. It is the image of what we do and become the one that has to be decentralized, not the essence.
I thus plead for the construction of the portfolio, for a return to the personal website, using social media as a game of mirrors that reflects us where we should also be present.
i.
‘Shocking’ seems like a bizarre choice of word but I think there is an interesting issue here – I’ve noticed that PhD students and ECRs seem much more likely than anyone else to use a blog as a personal website rather than rely on a hosted university page. There’s obvious reasons for this (e.g. it’s hugely unlikely they’re going to be at their institution on any sort of long-term basis) but I’m intrigued to see what other people think.