Social Media for Researchers and Online Personal Branding by Dilip Singh Mutum - HTML preview

   5: Using Twitter to boost your

    research profile

In this chapter

• Twitter: an overview
• Asking questions
• Tracking conversations
• How different researchers use Twitter
• Potential problems with using Twitter

It may be hard to explain your research using just 140 characters. However, an increasing number of researchers are doing just that: using Twitter as a means of sharing their work.

Twitter: an overview

You can subscribe to other users’ tweets by following them. Users who like your tweet can then retweet it, sending it out to their own group of followers.

When you post a tweet, other users can reply with their own tweet and your user name is automatically appended so that you can track the reply. On the Twitter page, you can see the replies by clicking @Mentions on the menu.

Asking questions

By asking questions on Twitter11 you can get almost instant feedback on certain topics (depending on your followers).

If you have a research question, post it up on Twitter and use hashtags12 (for example, #warwick) for the specific keywords which you think are important. Hashtags mean your tweet will be seen, and retweeted, by more users.

It’s important to acknowledge others’ responses to your questions, as this can help you build relationships with other users.

Tracking conversations

If you tweet a lot and have conversations back and forth, you can sometimes lose track of the conversations between you and another user, especially if you have loads of followers. This can be a problem if you want to look up old conversations you had several months ago.

You can use Bettween (http://bettween.com/) to track conversations between you and another user (or between any two users) by just putting in the two Twitter user names.

When you have thousands of followers, it is almost impossible to follow all the conversations going on and an application like Tweetdeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/) can help you manage the flood of information. This application allows you to organise and manage the people you follow and the topics more effectively without even opening your browser.

How different researchers use Twitter

Different people use Twitter differently. Some people use it as a way to disseminate news about their research findings, while others use it to keep up to date with what people in their field of research are doing. Twitter can also be great way to build a network of people who can help you with your research.

Here are some examples of academics who use Twitter in different ways to further their research:

• Roberta, a Teaching fellow at the School of Management, Royal Holloway, mainly uses it to share news she finds interesting with her followers. She also finds it interesting to read updates from political activists.
• Finola, a Senior Lecturer in marketing at Kings College, London, also uses Twitter to keep up with news, recent work and conferences on specific topics that interest her, like copyright and social media. She also follows academics and critics concerned with film, her main research area, and publicises events and calls for papers.
• Professor Mustafa at the Brunel Business School uses Twitter to note some of his findings. His Twitter account is linked to his Facebook account and the most interesting discussions, for him, take place in Facebook.

Potential problems with using Twitter

If you are a new user and do not have that many followers, the use of Twitter as a research tool can be somewhat limited. Linking it with other social networks such as Facebook (via the Twitter application) and LinkedIn, where you might have more friends, will help you build up a Twitter presence.

Also, sometimes 140 characters are just not enough to get the message across; for discussion of complicated issues you may need to contact users directly via email or by phone, if they are willing.