Social Media for Academia - All You Need to Know

Social media sites are the world's biggest scientific societies. In the old days, scientists used to travel to conferences once a year to upskill, network, present their research and discuss ideas with a small group of peers. There's still a space for scientific societies and conferences, and the best ones have adapted well to the modern world. But now, through effective use of social media platforms, we can be instantly updated with ongoing research and discussions, read and watch research updates at any time from anywhere, and present our findings to far more people, both inside and outside of academia, than would ever fit in a lecture theatre. This video will share tips and experiences to help you use social media effectively within academia. I'm Dr Stuart McErlane-Naylor, a Senior Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Biomechanics at the University of Suffolk in the UK. I'm a Social Media Editor for the journal Sports Biomechanics, and I oversee social media as Vice President for Publications of the International Society of Biomechanics in Sports. I also run this YouTube channel, posting regular lectures, presentations and tutorials. According to this paper, my ratio of followers to citations makes me a Science Kardashian, although I'm not sure if that's a compliment regarding my social media use or an insult regarding my citation count. In fact, here's my CV after highlighting in red the things that wouldn't have happened if it weren't for social media, or yellow for things that probably wouldn't have happened. The opportunities that have come as a result include research collaborations, consultancy, funding bids, and probably even a job. But what about traditional citation-based metrics? In one study, journal editors tweeted summaries of random articles from leading heart journals, four per day for 14 days. A year later, those articles had four and a half times more citations than the control articles that weren't tweeted. We should remember that this is one relatively small study in one specific discipline, but still, the results are interesting. Regardless of whether this relationship holds up in other areas, there is a lot more to be gained from social media. And these types of analyses ignore other benefits or reasons for use, and ignore the papers published or skills learned that would never have even happened without it. The lines between social media and our offline lives are becoming more and more blurred. Almost everything that we traditionally do offline can be done through social media to a greater and more targeted audience, in less time and at less expense. This includes recruiting participants, finding collaborators, discussing research, getting feedback on your work, presenting your own research, learning from others, staying up to date with the literature and events, and disseminating findings to specific audiences or the general public. It addresses a ready-made audience, and can provide an effective pathway to impact, engaging with various stakeholders throughout the research process. There are, of course, potential downsides, but I'll try to share my experiences of how I've tried to manage my professional social media use, and how to maximise the benefits. I recently shared a video outlining my three principles for upskilling in academia, and the same principles apply to social media use. The first is prioritising evergreen topics and content. These are things that remain available and relevant for a long time. If you can create and consume content that will work for you well into the future, and create opportunities while you sleep or work on other things, this can act as what writer David Perel calls a serendipity vehicle. Secondly, content produced or consumed should compound. That is, build on top of each other or serve multiple purposes so that the total value is much greater than the sum of its parts. And finally, you should look to automate as many processes as possible, or create reusable templates to reduce future time investments. So let's start from the very top, with a series of do's and don'ts for each stage of the process. I'll mainly focus on Twitter as an example, but most principles are transferable, and I'll mention other networks where specific differences apply. First things first, you need to set up your account. Your name should be the name you go by professionally, the one used in any publications, and it should be consistent across all platforms. If you work within a specific niche, then you could add an emoji to the end of your name to communicate that really clearly. For example, adding a cricket bat or badminton racket to the end of my name would be a great way to increase awareness of my research in those sports, but it doesn't work when your research covers multiple areas or when trying to target a broader discipline in general. Your name and handle work together as a pair, just like a YouTube thumbnail and title. People usually see both of them together, so there's a possibility to communicate more by not just repeating the same information twice. You can therefore use the handle to communicate some additional context. Personally, I use this to include my discipline of biomechanics, so I use at biomex stew on all platforms. Don't include anything like an institution name that might change in the future, and make sure you're not too niche that it could fail to match future research interests. Next up are your bio and header image. Again, these will usually be seen together, so there's no point repeating yourself. Both should communicate who you are though and why people should follow you. I use my header image to show some of the areas I research, to introduce or reinforce some of my consistent branding from other platforms and posts, and to include some roles that I don't want clogging up the bio. The bio itself is kept mainly for the value proposition, i.e. what you offer. For me, this is that I'm a sports biomechanist and that I share things I find interesting or useful. That's the most important part, not listing a mini CV or a supposedly impressive job title. If you want to get really technical here, then you can indulge in a bit of search engine optimisation. I'm never going to appear top of searches for sports biomechanics because of the journal, societies, and research groups by the same name. However, starting my bio with sports biomechanist helps me to appear near the top of the Twitter search when people search for sports biomechanist. I also use the bio to let people know I'm open to messages. This has led to some great opportunities and removes the barrier for anybody hesitating about getting in touch over social media. Don't present at a conference with your Twitter handle on the slide and then have your DMs set to private. Twitter DMs are often where the real magic happens, just out of view. Taking people across the public to private bridge, to steal another quote from David Perel, and actually starting collaborations or opportunities off the back of it. Building a relationship in public, if possible, and then direct messaging. But you can just go straight to the DMs if you make it mutually beneficial, or at least interesting. Think about what you offer them, rather than only thinking about what you can take from the conversation. And get to the point. People want to help, but don't have time to waste. As for your profile picture, this should probably be a professional-looking image, or something that reinforces your skill set or discipline. The most important point is that you should use the same image across everything you do on the internet. For many who don't know you personally, this image is you. You'd be surprised how many people fail to recognize you as the same person once you change this. I've also included some branding in my personal profile picture, just to reinforce things across different platforms. Finally, most platforms allow you to pin one post at the top of your profile. This should reinforce your value proposition, and be the final step in convincing people to follow you once they've already stumbled upon your page. Or it can simply be something you want to promote and want everybody who visits your profile to see. Your latest research article, for example. Personally, I have a number of posts that I use here depending on why people are likely to be discovering me and visiting my profile. For example, if I've posted about our cricket research, I will pin a post about my Science of Cricket lecture series. If I've posted about some useful resources, I'll pin a post about the resources section of my website. If my recent posts are research related, then I might pin a thread about our recent research. This ensures that anybody visiting my profile after seeing a tweet gets that reassurance that they're in the right place, and that they're likely to find other related content. If you've already included your institution in your bio, then adding your location is pointless repetition. So you can instead use the location field to add an extra call to action or value proposition. For me, it directs people towards my website. When you decide who to follow on social media, you are literally curating your future thoughts. It's therefore really important to think carefully about your information diet and what you want to be consuming. I regularly go through and audit the list of accounts that I follow. Even if somebody posts useful stuff, I won't follow them if that useful stuff is lost within a sea of other posts that I'm less interested in. My main bit of advice here would be to trust the algorithms. If somebody you don't follow posts something really important within your discipline, or if a key paper is published, you'll see it anyway. Others will share it or talk about it, and you'll see it that way. Especially if you follow the accounts of journals and people who are most likely to share or interact with that useful content. For a select group of people where you really don't want to miss a post, it's possible to be notified whenever they post. I have this turned on for a number of people who share interesting articles within my discipline. Social media can be useful for keeping up to date and for learning, even if you never post. But if you go with that approach, it's unlikely to create additional opportunities for you. It's also worth considering the importance of building an engaged audience in advance of that one time you actually want or need to share something important. I've seen a few suggestions for a rule of thirds that you should approximately do equal measures of your own posts, sharing from others, and engaging in conversation. You should consider why somebody would follow you and what type of person you're posting for. I imagine myself as a PhD student and post the things that I would have wanted to see then. It's useful to have one avatar in mind, such as a biomechanics PhD student who is looking to upskill and increase their awareness of different areas slightly outside of their specific research focus. You can then include other avatars, such as a practitioner with an interest in your specific research topic. Keeping these avatars in mind can help to maintain a clear focus. Outside of work, I'm a netball umpire in the UK Super League. In the past, my tweets used to be roughly 50% academia and 50% netball. I put a lot of attention into maintaining a good balance of the two. And in the end, all it did was prevent either audience from ever engaging fully with my posts. You end up losing followers or being punished by the algorithms because half of your tweets simply don't interest each follower. The difference it made when I chose to focus my accounts solely on academia was massive. I've quoted David Perel a lot in this video, but he has another concept that I really like. He talks about the importance of finding and establishing your personal monopoly. That's your unique combination of skills, interests, and personality traits. Find a combination of these that's unique to you and which you can monopolise. Everybody can be the best in the world at a specific combination of characteristics. So you know that posting can be beneficial and you might have an idea about the niche that you want to post about. But many people struggle to know exactly what to post or you might think that you don't have enough research to post about. At this point, I just want to reinforce that you don't need to have a finished research article to share and you can possibly gain a lot more by building in public and sharing the earlier stages of your research process. For example, you could share or summarise interesting papers during your literature review. You're not claiming to be an expert in anything, but simply sharing what you're reading or learning. When you're a bit further along the literature review process, you might be able to post a summary of a set of papers or a small research area or pose a question relating to something you're struggling with. You can share progress during data collection, provide tutorials or summaries of your data processing and analysis techniques. You could share and discuss your results and interpretations and ultimately promote your final published paper. And remember that all of that is only a third of the overall picture as you can still engage with others about their research and share interesting or useful posts from others. If you do this consistently within the area of your personal monopoly, that serendipity vehicle will start to kick into gear. Do think about the time of day that you post. Tweets in particular have a very short half-life and so you want to make sure that there's enough early engagement to encourage the algorithm to keep showing it to more people. For me, I seem to get the most engagement when both the UK and US are active, typically in the evening UK time. You can check when your audience is most active by looking within the media studio on Twitter. YouTube and some other sites have similar features. You can schedule tweets to go out at particular times, but make sure you remember and don't schedule anything that could be made to look bad by future events in between. If you do schedule, I recommend going for slightly after the round time so that your post will be more recent than any rush of other scheduled tweets coming out at a similar time. If I'm retweeting or engaging with somebody else's post, I'll do this whenever I see it. The scheduling is only for that third of things I want to personally put out. And even within that section, there'll be times when it's more beneficial to be the first to post about something or to post while a particular event is actually happening. When it comes to sharing your published articles, I have some specific do's and don'ts. Don't just tweet that a paper has been accepted without any useful information. If nothing else, you're taking some sting out of your actual publication announcement. You'd be better off combining both. Say how delighted you are when you actually share a link and some more information. That way, all of the congratulations, replies and happy for you likes can help to boost the actual paper to more people anyway. Similarly, don't put the paper on research data or similar sites until you have an abstract and ideally an article or at least a link to share. You only get one hit that people being told you've got a new paper. So make sure there's actually a paper for them to view. If they then interact with it, the algorithms will show more people. By the way, if you're finding any of this useful or interesting, please hit the like button below the video. On the subject of social media algorithms, that little engagement signal can really help the channel and video to grow. Once you've uploaded your paper to research data or a similar site, do respond quickly to any requests for the full text. If somebody has requested your article, it's quite likely they're working on something right now and are looking to potentially cite your work. I also personalise the response, adding a note to let me know if they have any questions. This takes seconds and sparks interesting and useful discussions. Do make use of the author accepted version and find out where and when you can share this. I set reminders for the dates when any embargo periods end so I can make them available as quickly as possible. It's important to maximise who can access the article if it isn't already open access. Note that you are often allowed to post this version on a personal website immediately, even if there are embargoes on institutional repositories and ResearchGate, etc. Google Scholar will even find and index your website version so that people are directed towards an accessible version. Always check the rules of the publishers though before sharing. If you're going to share the accepted version, consider tidying it up a bit and making it a bit more presentable or readable. Once you've uploaded versions of your article to multiple sites, you have a choice of which one to link to from your social media posts. The default should be the official journal version. However, it's worth thinking about whether driving traffic to a different version, such as on ResearchGate, could encourage that site's algorithms to then show your paper to even more people. Or perhaps you want to drive people to the version on your website so that they then stick around and might see your other publications. The most important thing is to have a strategy and a reason for doing things. Likewise, you should agree a strategy between co-authors. There's no point in four co-authors putting out four separate tweets at a similar time and none of them individually getting enough engagement to be promoted widely. Similarly, there's no point in one author jumping the gun and diminishing the impact of another's carefully planned strategy. One of the biggest benefits of sharing other people's research is that you can play around with different communication styles and figure out what works for when it's time to communicate your own research. One thing I learned early on was not to just share a link. Here's an example of one of my poor early attempts at promoting a paper on Twitter. You should make sure the tweet itself adds value to the reader and gives them a reason to engage with it and share it wider. This could be a summary, some added context or implications, providing and provoking some thought, or simply a key quote or figure from the paper. Another example is when watching a good presentation at a conference. You could tweet about how good it is, which I'm sure the author will appreciate, but it adds no value for anybody that's not already watching. Alternatively, you could summarize the things you learned or add a photo of a key slide. This adds value to the reader of the tweet so that they learn something from your tweet and by following you. How should you structure your tweet? Your first task is to stop the scroll. An image can help with that, as can appropriate line spacing. The first line works well as a title. You can also use bold or italic font to highlight keywords or phrases. There are websites that allow you to copy and paste this into social media sites where it isn't directly available. Just googling something like bold text for Twitter can bring up some options. Line spaces can then help to break up a block of text, making it more readable, and a single short line of text can work just as well as a punchline as it did as a title. On sites such as LinkedIn, it's additionally important to consider what will show above the fold to encourage readers to click for more. It's important to communicate in the least time possible, whether that be in a tweet or a video. Remove all unnecessary or complicated words or phrases and use short sentences. In fact, Twitter is great for improving your concise writing skills. I tend to favor American spelling rather than UK English for the greater audience, especially following my own audience metrics. If you can word your posts in a way that encourages comments or replies, then even better. If you need to go into more detail then use additional tweets within a thread. Ideally, each tweet within the thread should be shareable and should make sense on its own for anybody seeing it out of context, but still obviously be part of a wider thread in order to encourage people to read the rest. When writing a thread, draft it in full beforehand. Don't just send the first tweet and then start typing the second out as a reply and then the third. Nobody's going to sit and refresh the page waiting for each tweet to appear one at a time. Twitter will often show the first tweet and the last two in the thread within people's main feed, so pay particular attention to what's within those and how they work together as a group. If you need to schedule a thread, you can do through sites such as Typefully. Often the goal of our posts is to get people to click on a link. This is in direct competition with the goal of the site to keep people online and sell more advertising space. So it's worth thinking about how we share links. There's a definite trade-off between hiding the link so that the algorithm shows your post to more people and the downside that brings in terms of adding an extra step between the reader and your desired clicks or downloads. A great example of this is the tactic of putting a link in a separate tweet below the main one or in a reply below a LinkedIn post. The jury's still out on this one for me, so it's worth playing around with different options and seeing what works for you. It's interesting though that MrBeast, the biggest YouTuber on the planet, announces new videos on Twitter without a link. I suspect the reasons are twofold. He wants the Twitter algorithm to show his tweet to more people and he also wants people to access his video from within YouTube so that those algorithms will show the content to more people within that platform. When you do include a link, don't use sites to shorten the link as people are less likely to click on something if they don't know where it's leading them. Most social media sites automatically hide the end of long links anyway. Removing the HTTPS and WWW from links can enable more of the useful bit to remain visible. Oh, and don't link to PubMed. This is so frustrating. I want to read your article, not start a lengthy treasure hunt through the internet to find access to the article. Don't make the reader do more work than they need to. Just link to the actual article and preferably an open access version if one exists. More people will engage and share it that way too. So you've prepared your tweet. How can you ensure more people see it? Well, don't tag people who aren't featured within the tweet. That will just annoy them. You can DM people the tweet if you genuinely think that person will find it useful. Don't ask for a share or apply any pressure. If you're lucky, they might just like or share it anyway. Do tag co-authors, departments, journals, publishers, etc. This is called signal boosting and can really help encourage those accounts to share your post. Tagging in an image ensures that you don't harm the readability of the post, although you can still work the journal and co-authors into the main text. When it comes to journals, departments or publishers, I suggest checking their profile and their recent posts to see what their policy on sharing seems to be. This can prevent you wasting a tag and harming your readability for nothing. For example, some journals only post their own tweets, whereas others will share posts by authors. The same applies for other accounts. Don't use hashtags that nobody searches for. This really harms the readability. Hashtags can be great if you're talking about a major event like the Olympics or a popular TV series. But if you're just adding them at the start of random words, nobody is searching for it. And if they are, they're probably not interested in your post anyway. When you want to give your post a second little boost, rather than retweeting yourself, adding a reply underneath will make it reappear within people's feeds. But make sure your reply adds some additional value or context. Definitely don't like your own post. Any minor boost to the algorithm isn't worth it for the appearance it gives off to others. And once you've done all of this, you don't want to lose your bank of knowledge, resources and experiences. So I recommend an app such as TimeHop to provide annual reminders of the useful things you've shared and interacted with in the past. This is also useful for keeping an audit of what's out there with your name attached to it. Let me know in the comments below what tip you're going to try out from this video, any tips you can add or any questions. For strategies and principles to help you learn useful skills in academia, check out this short video next.