Strategies to improve visibility and impact through social media
As a blogger, author of a book, chapter or article; it should come as
no surprise that we look to find ways to increase readership. This
morning whilst researching for a project I am working on, I came across
an article by Professor Christine Pascale
who provides a list of tips for researchers and authors to improve
research visibility and impact. Whilst this focuses on research, many of
the tips can easily be applied to any form of writing you wish to
share. It could be your blog about poetry or a book you have written.
In the list below I have added in red some additional suggestions of my own and hyperlinked the social media sites that are suggested.
Christine’s top tips for researchers and authors
- Publicise yourself and your research; for example, put a message and hyperlink to the article in your Email signature box.
Include a link to your blog or Amazon listing.
- Write a review, reviews are more likely to be cited than original research papers.
Consider writing a review of another author’s work in your own blog.
- Promote and present your work at conferences, with colleagues and
through your student body. Persuade the organizers of a meeting or
conference to make publicly available the presentations made at
meetings; not just the published abstracts.
Include links to your work on the final slide. Upload your presentation to Slideshare, which is an excellent space for people to share, like and comment upon your work.
- Set up a web site devoted to your work and research projects and
post links to manuscripts of publications, conference abstracts, and
supplemental materials such as images, illustrations, slides, specimens,
and progress reports on the site.
Tools like WordPress and Blogger make
this very easy and can be set up at static pages just like a website.
Including visible sharing buttons on your site enables readers to share
what they have read with others.
- Ideas travel through networks and relationships. Build on these and be opportunistic.
Developing online networks on LinkedIn, Mendeley and ResearchGate
- Use your Facebook account, blogs, and social networks. Start a blog devoted to the research project.
This is an excellent way to
receive feedback. Include questions in your posts to encourage readers
to answer these using the comments.
- Consider communicating information about your research via Twitter.
Twitter provides an efficient platform for communicating and consuming
science.
You may want to include #hashtags for
keywords that relate to your work. For example blogging about social
media in higher education, I might include #HigherEd #socialmedia.
- Take advantage of SEO (search engine optimization) tips to enhance
retrieval of your research project web site by search engines. Work with
your webmaster to make sure your web page titles describe the content
of the web page and include the name of your research project. Include
meta tags in the page header section that include appropriate keywords
to describe the content of the page. Search engines look at this
“hidden” content and use it to determine search results page rankings.
When writing a blog post
think about the title and consider the search terms people may use to
locate information about your topic or specialism and include these
words.
- Research is not just text and figures. Create a podcast describing the research project and submit the podcast to YouTube or Vimeo.
You may also want to consider AudioBoo or SoundCloud which are social sites for sharing audio.
- Sign up for other social networking sites to increase your visibility and connect with colleagues. Some useful sites are ResearcherID or LinkedIn. Sites such as Nature Network
allow and encourage interaction between users. Social network tools
provide a forum for disseminating your research, promoting discussion of
your work, sharing scientific information, and forming new
collaborations.
Consider joining groups or setting up your own in LinkedIn to discuss your own subject specialisms. Cloudworks is a space to share, find and discuss learning and teaching ideas and experiences. Scribd and Issuu are digital documents libraries that allow users to publish, discover and discuss original writings and documents.For further ideas on how to develop
the use of social media you may wish to look at a presentation I gave at
the University of Roehampton on Social Media and the Digital Scholar which is available on Slideshare.
References
Professor Dr Christine Pascal OBE
Source: http://www.educationarena.com/expertPanel/panel2013/pascal.asp
Strategies to improve visibility and impact through social media | Social Media 4 Us
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