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Top Tips for Academics
More and more academics are turning to Twitter to connect withtheir peers and promote their work, but how can academics getthe most out of Twitter?
 
7 top twitter tips for academics:
1
Tweet yourself, your projects and your institution
2
 
Don’t just wait for people to find you: actively promote your twitter stream
 
3
Work on your signal-noise ratio
4
Get your timing right
5
Use Twitter as part of a wider social media and communications strategy
6
Constantly refine your practice
7
 
Remember it’s all about relationships
 
 
2
Once you’ve got the hang of Twitter, consider opening accounts for some of your research
groups or projects. Each of your research projects is likely to have a different focus, and
you’re probably a member of more than one group or institution in your University thatdoesn’t have a Twitter account. A project Twitter account is an easy addition to your next“Pathways to Impact” statement when you’re applying for funding, and some sort of engage-
ment with social media is increasingly expected by reviewers.Opening an institutional account will usually need to be a group decision. If everyone agrees,others can either send you material to tweet or you can give everyone the Twitter username
and password to tweet themselves (if so, you’ll need to agree on the nature of material youwant posted, or it may be easier to decide on the things you want to avoid). When you’re
busy revising your website ahead of the next REF, why not consider adding buttons to enable
readers to share what they’re reading via Twitter and other social media platforms?
 Open accounts for major research projects that will be going for a few years, and that you
hope will have some form of successor project in future (so you’ve got time to build a follow-ing and don’t have too many accounts to manage). Again, the burden doesn’t have to be en-
tirely yours
 –
it can be delegated to a post-doc and shared with other team members.
Tweet yourself, your projects and your institution
1
 
Other ideas you might want to consider:Link to your Twitter feed from your project/institution homepage, and include the linkin newsletters, presentations and consider putting it in your email signatureAlso market each Twitter account more actively (see Tip 2)Every time you do a conference/workshop/seminar presentation, put your slides online(e.g. using SlideSharewww.slideshare.net)and tweet them
Every time you get a paper published, tweet the link to the article on the publisher’swebsite (if it’s not open access, consider adding that you can send copies if need be). If 
you can get permission, upload a copy on Scribd and tweet the link (www.scribd.com)  Tweet quotes from speakers at conferences you attend, using the conference hashtag
(make one up if there isn’t one), to connect with other delegates and make them aware
of your workSet up Science Direct (or something similar) and Google news alerts for key words thatare particularly relevant to your work, so you can be the first to let your followers know
 
3 
Don’t just wait for people to find you:
actively promote your twitter stream
There are some easy things you can do to promote your twitter stream, like including links on yourhomepage, project websites and in your email signature. But more active promotion of your Twitterfeed can attract many more followers:
Make sure you’ve got an effective biography and enough really informative/useful tweets in your stream beforeactively marketing what you’re doing –
people will look through your previous tweets to make an assessment
about whether you’re worth following, so they must be good
 Contact relevant people with large followings to ask if they can re-
tweet key messages you’ve sent –
tweet or Di-
rect Message them via Twitter, and if that doesn’t work, find their email address via an internet search and email
(or phone) themUse hashtags (#) to make your tweets visible to more people (e.g. #PhDchat)
 –
notice which hashtags people
you’re following are using, and use them. If you’re planning a Twitter campaign on a particular topic (e.g. linked to
a new paper or policy brief), you could make up your own hashtag, but for it to work, others will need to use it, soyou may want to work on getting a key tweet including your hashtag re-tweeted by others with larger followings
Consider giving a free gift to your 1000th follower (or some other target) when you’re getting close to that number
of followers, and asking your followers to re-tweet the offer. This gets you lots of re-tweets and exposure to a
much larger audience of potential followers, and many will follow you simply because they’re interested in whatyou’re doing, rather than waiting till you reach 999 followers
 
2
 
The way most people find out about other people on Twitter is when they get followed. Default set-tings send an email to a user when a new person starts following them (including their brief biogra-phy)
 –
if they like what they read, chances are they will follow you. Twitter recommendations (onwww.twitter.com) can be helpful, but it will only recommend a few people and recommendations
are less so when you’re just starting out. If you log out of Twitter and search for your profile on the
website, Twitter will list others who are similar to you on the basis of who they follow and who fol-
lows them, compared to you. But the best way to find others who may be interested in what you’re
doing is to see who is following other users who are tweeting very similar things to you:
Who are the people you most frequently re-
tweet? Who’s tweets are you most likely to follow links from? Go tothese people’s profiles and see who’s following them, then systematically follow their followers
 It is best to try and be a bit selective
 –
you can usually filter out the least relevant people from their username
(e.g. don’t bother following companies that are clearly following the person to try and get their custom)
 Twitter monitors the ratio of people following you to the number of people you follow to stop spammers, so you
will reach a limit beyond which you cannot follow anyone else. But don’t let that stop you getting the word outabout what you’re doing –
 
unfollow users (they won’t be notified that you unfollowed them) to free up room to
follow others
The problem with this is that you won’t be able to use this account to follow the people you’re most interested inlearning from (as they’ll be lost in the noise of all the other tweets from people you just wanted to know you ex-isted). To ensure you can still use Twitter to gather information from those you’re most interested in, eithermake sure you only market your project or institutional Twitter accounts in this way, or set up a “personal” Twit-ter account where you follow those you’re most interested in and a “work” Twitter account that follows many
more people, where you put out most (if not all) of your tweets
 
Lists can also be useful for this
 –
set up a list of users who tweet in different areas so you can look at a more se-lective timeline of tweets that interest you
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