Scholarly Profiling

Using social media platforms can be an excellent way to promote your research and share it with a wider audience. Social media channels may also help you to access up-to-date information in your field, stay in contact with colleagues, and exchange ideas on different subjects. However, this can be a time consuming exercise so only use social media if it is working for you. An abandoned profile can do more harm than good as it does not reflect well on the timeliness of your research. So, the first question you should ask yourself is whether you have the time for social media or not. If your time is limited, it might be a good idea to create a targeted profile on LinkedIn and improve it occasionally. Other channels that can help you showcase your work without requiring frequent postings are ORCID, ResearchGate, and Mendeley. In all these platforms, it is usually enough to add recent publications or other updates to your profile to keep it “interesting”. Other resources such as Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube are more time-consuming. Building a network on these resources will take time, energy and commitment so it is important to look around and find out whether your colleagues are also active in those communities.

• Twitter: You can use this platform to tweet about latest research, blogs, conference presentations, and more. You can also link your work in your tweets. Tweets cannot be more than 140 characters long.
• LinkedIn: It is a professional networking platform. You can use it share updates on your research or a paper in a specific group or publicly. You can also provide links to your blogs, articles, websites, and more.
• Blogging: You can use different blogging platforms such as WordPress to share your research work. You can write detailed articles or research stories to engage your audience. You can also provide links to your work to increase visibility.
• Mendeley: This platform can help you grow your network by joining groups of your interest. You can not only view your research impact but also view others popular works.
• Facebook: Similar to other platforms, you can use it to update your followers and contacts with your latest work, blogs, presentations, and more.
• ResearchGate: It is a social networking platform especially for scientists and researchers to share and interact on research topics. It can also be used effectively to collaborate with other researchers on a common interest area.

Resources

A-Z of Social Media for Academia

How to write a blogpost from your journal article in 11 easy steps

Set up a free account on  https://twitter.com You need to provide your name, email and password as well as user name to identify yourself to other followers. You can also set up a group twitter account for a research group or department. Provide some details about yourself so people know who you are.

Once set up find people to follow by using the search box for colleagues, use keywords to find conversations about your area of interest, find recommendations on your profile page. Follow people who post tweets that interest you and pass them on (retweet) to other people. You can unfollow people by going to your list of followers, mouse over the follow bar until unfollow comes up and then click.

Most urls are too long for twitter but can be shortened by using bitly.com or tinyurl.com

@ is the most important symbol in twitter as it refers to individual users...@username is hyperlinked and by clicking on that enables you to answer a question or it can refer to someone

# bestows metadata on the word it is linked to…this can be an event, publication, research area etc. Makes the tweet more searchable and links it to other tweets that hashtag the same word. Stick to a schedule for your tweets say morning or afternoon. Don’t do a whole load together, spread them out.

Can use the twitter search button but also twitter search . Hashtags for searching hashtags

Resources

10 tips for tweeting research 

A nifty guide for academics using Twitter,