Promoting your Research for Maximum Impact: Social Media - Twitter

Twitter is essentially a micro-blogging platform, allowing for the strategic identification of key stakeholders and enabling instantaneous social support, collaboration and contribution. Most importantly, unlike other networks such as Facebook/LinkedIn which require friend requests/connections to be accepted, Twitter has no such barriers.

On the left, the Twitter profile for one of the authors of the sample article referred to. Note that Frederik has nearly 7,000 followers. On the right, the Twitter profile for Thomas Roulet, a Senior Lecturer in Organisation Theory and Information Systems. Note that Tomas has nearly 15,000 followers.

Twitter is a really useful tool for instant dissemination of your research at all stages. In this case, Thomas had tweeted about mental health in academia and due the fact that Frederick follows Thomas, he saw this tweet. This presented a perfect opportunity to highlight the sample article, and this prompted Thomas to send the below response. If we consider just the combined follower numbers of both, the potential audience for this research is 22,000 people. This does not factor in the total followers for the 5 people who retweeted the tweet from Thomas.

1. Hashtags - Tweets are a moment in time so use of hashtags are vital for traction #mentalhealth #research
2. Timing – consider your audience, is morning or evening best? Academics tend to be most active on commute to/from work
3. Link to articles - every time you get a paper published, tweet the link to the article (DOI)
4. Conferences - Tweet quotes from speakers at conferences you attend, using the conference hashtag if available
5. Signal-noise ratio – be mindful of posting large amounts of content not related to your research
6. Images – try to include image where possible, better engagement