How to use twitter for academia

What is twitter useful for?

1. Stay up to date with new research
2. Find jobs, grant opportunities, academic meet-ups
3. Network and become (more) visible
4. Attend conferences virtually (check out the all-twitter brain conference http://brain.tc  and of course #brainTC in Twitter)
5. Get access to paywalled papers (e.g. #canihaspdf)
6. Find help & resources
7. Get input from other scientists on data, stats, writing, etc.
8. Teach the public, and learn from other twitter users

To learn more, watch the video from the live session where Nikola (nikola.me), Tommi  (mindsync.wordpress.com) and me talked about our personal experiences with academic twitter:

Here are some more practical tips on how to get the most out of twitter (what we couldn’t cover yesterday during the live session): 

• • Whom to follow?
    • Other scientists (and labs), journalists, funding bodies, science enthusiasts and communicators
    • See who your followers are following in turn, or whose content they retweet
    • Use public lists that others have created for specific topics. (Here’s a good one for CogNeuro people: https://twitter.com/neuroconscience/lists/cogneuro)
• • Keep your newsfeed manageable
    • Use services like TweetDeck (tweetdeck.twitter.com) – this allows you to split up your main feed into “sub-feeds” which are more manageable, based on topic or any other criterion you want.
    • Websites such as Buffer (buffer.com) and Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) will let you schedule tweets – you can make a queue of tweets which will then be posted automatically at (ir)regular intervals. This saves your time, and also benefits your followers who live in different time zones.
    • Turn off most if not all notifications! Social networks are built to be addictive – having your phone buzz every time someone tweets or replies to you will become very distracting once you start following more people. Making sure that you use Twitter at times that suit *you* is key.
    • Remember to weed your following list periodically – unfollow people you are no longer interested in, or add new people who you just met at conferences, etc.
• • Your public persona
    • It is generally a good idea to keep your personal and professional social media accounts separate, especially if you are an early career researcher.
    • If you want to keep your account professional, make a separate private account. Then you’ll have the flexibility to post about anything else you want, while not angering all the people who followed you for your science content.
• • How to tweet and content ideas
    • Sharing links – share why a news story, publication, video, or image captured your interest
    • Post short updates on your research; make these posts longer by using threads (almost like a blog post)
    • Start a dialogue or conversation by tagging other users, or using hashtags. Some good ones are: #phdchat #postdoc #ECRchat #scicomm #openscience
    • Do an online journal club – Twitter can be great to talk about new papers you’ve read, ask questions, etc.
    • Public AMAs (ask-me-anything sessions) – answer questions from the public about your work. One good example of this is @IAmSciComm, which has a new scientist host their account each week, and talk to thousands of science interested followers!
    • Live-tweet talks at conferences – you don’t need to take it too seriously, even a couple of bullet points per talk will contribute, and if more than one person does it it will create a nice public record of a conference. It is very common to get thank you messages from people for sharing info from conferences they couldn’t attend.

More practical tips can be found in a recent Cogtales post.

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