Using social media is an effective way for promoting your research since it allows you to have a direct access to your audience and offers a great platform to improve your journal’s profile. Your subject expertise, as an editor or author, enables you to promote your paper on social media. The following five tips give you insight into using social media in order to engage online community in your research.
Choose the right social media platform:
Decide which networks suits your personality and target audience and commit yourself to posting contents most related to your study and news in your field of study
Building your community
You cannot build an extensive social media in a short period of time. At first you can reach a few fellow academics, but this should not discourage you. Based on a study in Facets, when an academic social platform gets 1000 followers on Twitter they will increasingly reach a more varied audience including members of the public, media, applied organization and other groups- a great way to increase the number of your paper’s readers.
Tone of your voice matters
writing in a clear and straightforward language in social media is essential. Technical details are important in your research paper; however, when communicating with the wider community it is necessary that you present your findings in understandable terms. Your content must be arranged in a way to explain not only what your article is about but also why your followers should care.
Producing compelling content
Try to make your post engaging and compelling to your audience. You can use images for this purpose, they make your posts standout. Relevant hashtags increase the visibility; mention handles to directly engage with others, especially co-authors, your university, the journal, society, etc. The application of these methods leads to the increases of engagements in social media such as retweets and likes on your posts.
Have interaction with your followers
Social media is where you can have open dialogue with your audience, so do interact with them. React to the comments, reply to the questions and thank those who create posts related to your papers. Also it is a good idea to interact with those who don’t follow you because this can spread awareness of your social media presence. These are the ways to drive conversation about your research. Moreover, it will raise your article’s Altmetric score.