CRIS Spotlight on …
Using Social Media to Promote Your Research
Increase your research impact by engaging on social media and curating your online research profile.
Building an Online Research Profile through Social Media
Quick References for Getting Started
- How to curate your digital identity as an academic, CHE
- Branding yourself as an academic, CHE
- Build your academic brand, because being brilliant doesn’t cut it anymore, Times Higher Education
- Social Media Introductory Guides for Researchers – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Kudos, Reddit, Blogging, Office of Scholarly Communication, University of Kent
- Ten simple rules for getting started on Twitter as a scientist
- How to create a tweet, UK Research and Innovation – Economic and Social Research Council
More Detailed Support
- NCFDD 3-part course: Developing a Strategic Plan to Use Social Media to Enhance Scholarship (Recording and Handout)
Register for an NCFDD account here. Learn more about accessing NCFDD from recent memo from the Provost - 10 Days of Twitter @ University of Toronto this course outline/blog is from a graduate professional skills course, but includes relevant content for faculty including tips on setting up a Twitter account, using hashtags, bookmarking tweets, dealing with trolling, and etc.
Engaging on Social Media as an Academic
General Considerations and Pitfalls to Avoid
- How can Social Media Fit into Academic Life? Jackman Humanities Institute, Seminars in January 2020, with Dr. David M. Perry
- Social Media in the Workplace especially Academia, blog
- Social Media Guidelines – Communications, UTM
- Using Twitter in university research, teaching, and impact activities: a guide for academics and researchers (London School of Economics)
Additional Resources
- The A-Z Guide of Social Media for Academics, Times Higher Education
- U of T Directory of Social Media
- Communicating Science with Social Media; An Introduction, a set of articles about crafting scientific content and disseminating via social media.
- Social scholarship revisited: Changing scholarly practices in the age of social media, 2019. This article analyzes the benefits and challenges of scholars enacting social scholarship and provides recommendations.
Promoting Your Research Findings
Promote your Research Findings and Publications
Social Media Metrics
- Does Tweeting Improve Citations? One-Year Results From the TSSMN Prospective Randomized Trial. 2020. This study found that tweeting results in significantly more article citations over time.
- Metrics Toolkit – a resource to measure the impact of your work across various social media outlets
- Twitter in Scholarly Communication, Altmetric blog series June 2018 addressing topics like what kind of publications get shared on twitter and how publications are diffused on Twitter
- Research impact through book and publication metrics, and Academic Social Networks (ASNs), UTL Guide
- What’s the most important metric for online science communicators? The Medium, 2018.
Evidence for Social Media as an Effective Knowledge Dissemination Strategy
See all
- Social media for rapid knowledge dissemination: early experience from the COVID ‐19 pandemic. 2020. This editorial argues social media is a strategy for rapid knowledge dissemination.
- Impact of Author Tweeting on the Dissemination of Publications on Twitter: A Study of Respiratory and Critical Care Journal. 2019. This study cited in Nature found author-tweeted publications had a higher number of tweets at one year post publication than publications not tweeted by author.
- The Social Media Revolution Is Changing the Conference Experience: Analytics and Trends From Eight International Meetings, 2015. This article argues that Twitter can powerfully amplify the content presented at scientific meetings.
- The Impact of Social Media Promotion with Infographics and Podcasts on Research Dissemination and Readership. 2018. This study found that use of social media led to more views of research abstracts but not necessarily full text views.
- Social Media for Knowledge-Sharing: A Systematic Literature Review. 2019. This article gives an overview of how social media is increasingly being used for knowledge sharing.
