How Should Academics Engage Through Social Media?

The myth of the solitary genius in academia is long busted. Successful academics are networked academics. Social media is the quickest, easiest, and furthest-reaching means to develop, expand, and manage your network.

For most academics, the question of if or why they should engage with social media has been answered. There are advantages at any career stage. Among these advantages are crowdsourcing answers to research problems, keeping current with rapid changes in the field, developing a following of potential consumers of your work, sharing ideas, meeting scholars from around the world with similar interests, finding collaborators (including prospective graduate students), sharing accomplishments and failures, emotional support, and humanizing the world of academia.

To some academics, it is just one more thing to do that pulls them away from teaching, supervision, and research. Yet, if done correctly, I argue that engaging with social media can be the difference between generating dust-gathering research findings and stale pedagogy, and creating impactful research with a wide reach and innovative teaching techniques.

How to Be Successful on Social Media As an Academic

Social media refers to the means of interactions among people in which they create, share, and exchange information and ideas in virtual communities and networks. Some of the popular sites are Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Post., Mastodon, and several others. ResearchGate and Academia are also academic-focused sites that share many characteristics with social media. These are ways to create and join communities. Like all communities, there are advantages and disadvantages to every site.

Everyone is different and there is no right way to be successful on social media. But there are a few guidelines to consider as you navigate the maze and cultures of social media.

1. Know your goals. What do you want to achieve in your social media journey? This is always the key question that needs to be answered. Science communication, sharing ideas with peers, recruiting students, becoming a nano-influencer, sharing data, becoming a celebrity nerd model, increasing visibility and citations for your research articles, making pocket friends, finding a book publisher, and many others are all legitimate reasons for being on social media. Simply being a networked scholar increases the chances of being an innovative, high-quality, and influential modern scholar.
2. Be consistent. You may need to post regularly so that people get used to seeing your ideas. I believe that daily is a nice start. I got a foothold among Twitter followers by tweeting something about coffee in academia every morning. It helped me build a habit and build a community of people with shared interests.
3. Build the culture you want to see. Support others. Be kind. Be generous.
4. Moderate your world. All platforms allow you to block, report, ignore, or mute others. Unless you thrive on conflict, simply exile these people and their posts from your account. Life’s too short. Policing your virtual community is a way to ensure it is a useful and enjoyable place.
5. Be tied to goals, not platforms. Remember what you are trying to achieve. Being Instagram famous is probably not a useful academic goal. Go to the platform that best accomplishes your goals.
6. Be yourself, unless you are terrible. A sense of humor, sharing hobbies, or occasional profanity is not a problem. Be fun. There is a performative aspect of social media that is uncomfortable to many. Be genuine.
7. Unlike your research, people read your posts. Watch what you say because people remember. I have had my tweets from years ago quoted back to me at conferences. Scary. Never punch down (i.e., making fun of students or less powerful persons). Beware of what you say about colleagues—the information will very likely get back to them.
8. Each social medial site is its own culture. Every site has its own formal and informal values and cultures. Learning them is worthwhile.
9. Never forget your goals. I know that I need a break from social media when I start caring about my follower count. That is a good sign that I am losing sight of my goals. Trying to be famous on the ‘Gram is a bizarre academic goal.

Quick Breakdown

Here is my thumbnail sketch of each major social media site for academics.

• Facebook has been around for a while and is the preferred platform for many senior academics. It tries to be all things to all people. But it is a good platform for trying to reach a broad spectrum of readers.
• LinkedIn is mostly for business. I find it to be a good place for alt-ac sector job-seeking academics. There are often excellent posts and general information as well.
• Instagram is a visual platform. Photos dominate. It can be an excellent location for sharing microscopy or images from scans.
• Post is a new entry in the social media environment and will undoubtedly evolve. So far, it appears to me to be an excellent place for posting documents and having interactions about projects. There are some growing pains, but the moderating policies of posts encourage civility.
• Mastodon is an open-source site that is a federation of loosely tied instances (i.e., domains or communities), each with its own policies and moderation processes. There are also growing pains with this site. Yet I have found Mastodon to be an ideal format for idea sharing and dynamic discussions.
• Twitter was my personal favorite and primary social media outlet due to its ease of use and flexibility. I am diversifying and will likely be transitioning to other platforms and away from Twitter due to changes in the platform that I believe detract from my professional goals.

Unless you are an aspiring ornamental academic hermit, being part of a community is necessary to improve the quality of your work as a networked academic.

Recommendation: Although designed for Twitter, Dan Quintana's Twitter for Scientists is an excellent free resource on the topic and is a good overall primer about social media.