140 Characters is the New Black (part 2)
Engaging academics in social media
In reading part 1, I’ll now outline some very basic tips and tricks across three channels: Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube.
Follow your favourite academics, communities, organisations, businesses, journalists, news agencies.
Use:
- Sharing moments: live-tweeting and picture sharing in real time (especially handy for conferences which have their own #hashtag)
- Sharing information: linking out to a blog-post, Journal Article, an Event, or newspaper article.
- Social currency: connecting to other professionals, organisations, communities. You can ask for promotion (e.g. a retweet), name their contribution to an event you’ve organised (thanks to @!), invite them for collaborations. This works well as there’s bidirectional profit; they receive a plug from you, you might receive one back. This also aids transparency - all active agents are visible to the public.
Tips:
- Be concise and snappy with your tweets. They’re designed to be bite-sized. New research shows that the perfect length is around 100 characters!
- Join a #hashtag community! e.g. if you’re writing about Higher Education, use the #HigherEd tag! Check this page for more academic hashtags communities.
- When tweeting a user directly, use their handle at the beginning of the tweet e.g. “@heyDejan Hi, could you please RT my last tweet? Thanks!”
- If you want all your followers to see the above tweet, put a full stop in front of the handle (e.g. “.@heyDejan Hi…”) or use the handle elsewhere in the tweet (e.g. “Hi @heyDejan). Placing the handle at the beginning of the tweet means that only those following both accounts (e.g. yours and @heyDejan) will be able to see it on their feed.
LSE also have you covered on academic blogging!
Uses:
- Informal blogging: quick blog-posts with photos depicting an idea, reflection, problem or past event.
- Formal blogging: longer, reflective posts which capture an idea; its successes, problems, history and future.
- Mediums: Tumblr allows for a number of various mediums in blogging, including text posts, photos, videos, links, sound bites, quotes, dialogues.
note: Tumblr is just a proxy for a blogging platform. Feel free to play around with others such as WordPress.
Tips:
- Picture/Text ratio should be 50:50: plenty of eye-candy for your readers. Check here for a master-map of all ideal lengths for most channels! (Thank you Kevan Lee!)
- (Hash)tags: group similar posts together. For both archiving and promoting.
- Engagement: if you want somebody specific to read your post, mention them somewhere in it and ask them to check/edit the post before publication. You get a fresh pair of eyes and the pair you always wanted in one hit!
- Narrowcasting: you have your blogpost up, now what? It’s time to start feeding it to different communities. Tweet it out (include @ who might dish out a retweet), publish it on your Facebook (if you’re actually using it), or even email it around to people you think would be interested!
- Sign-Off: at the end of every blogpost write a sentence or two about how you can be reached. See the end of this blog as an example.
Following the rise of TED, videos are more popular than ever!
Uses:
- Vlogging: Can it be academic? Good question! This guy seems to think so.
- Posting interviews: these are short (1-2 minutes max) videos of people at events; their thoughts, feelings, expectations, inventions, ideas.
- Advertising: videos are a great form of marketing as they showcase what your events are like and what they can expect. Sometimes content is more fun, accessible and personable in video form compared to text.
Our very own David F. Flanders’ TedxHamburg Talk on 3D Printing
Tips:
- Video style: make sure you develop one with your own distinct voice.
- Editing: YouTube has a decent editing system.
- Privacy: YouTube has three main privacy systems (public, unlist, private). Public videos are accessible to anyone and can be searched through the YouTube search bar and Google more generally. Unlisted videos can only be accessed through the video’s custom link. You can email, tweet or embed unlisted videos to your specific audience. Private videos can only be viewed by the owner of the YouTube account (handy for editing).
Stay tuned for part 3, ‘the road ahead’ & more #ResBaz social media developments in the months ahead!
Research can be ‘bazaar’, we’re here to help! Don’t understand how? Read our mission statement. Flick us a tweet, watch a video, check out our page and follow our blog-posts - both formal and fun. Even better than the virtual, meet like minded researchers at one of our events. Come engage with the Melbourne research community!
Get started by contacting your discipline’s ‘Research Community Coordinator’ who can help you learn new tools and have fun collaborating with fellow researchers! Here’s the full list.
