For over two decades, advances in ICT have created a flood of information that has disrupted the traditional business marketplace and plunged it into the new attention economy where companies struggle to catch and maintain customer attention. A parallel shift can be seen for scientists in a new research attention economy.
Researchers face unprecedented competition to make their research stand out in a continually rising flood of journals and publications. The competition for impact and competition has never been so fierce.
The internet is the cause of this struggle to stand out. But it is also the solution. The internet provides many platforms for SMAP (social media for academic purposes) to increase the visibility and impact of research and the researcher. Unfortunately, researchers complain that they don’t have time to engage in these other platforms because they are too busy with research, writing it up, administration and teaching. But the real problem is a general ignorance of the value of this engagement and a specific strategy to implement it.
Open Science
The new paradigm of Open Science is putting pressure on researchers to be more open about the whole research cycle and to foster sharing and collaboration as early as possible. This implies a change in knowledge creation and dissemination to make research more
- global
- open
- transparent
- integral
- reliable
- Collaborative, and
- closer to citizens.
The main aims of the Open Science movement is to increase both the quality and benefits of science. Central to this movement are digital tools and social media technologies which act as key levers for change. Unfortunately, these tools are vastly underutilized and training in their effective use remains largely ignored by departments and research labs.
SMAP Tools and functions
For novel, cutting edge research, such as that done on Covid-19 during the pandemic, there is always the worry that someone may publish similar research results first. In this case, informal publication of results on field archive sites like BMC’s Biology Archive can establish a researcher’s claim to being first to publishing results. Similarly, publishing on a personal website blog and social media can also serve as timestamps of novel research. However, the benefits of using social media goes beyond giving research updates.
The social media for academic purposes (SMAP) include academic social media (ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Online Science) and more general social media like blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. The main functions of these media can be divided into three categories:
- content-sharing
- dialog
- monitoring.
For content sharing, microblogs (Twitter), short summaries, blog articles, Youtube vlogs or podcasts are common kinds of texts. For consistent social media posting, blogs can serve as the strategic hub with blog content getting modified and recycled through other social media (see below for an example). Social media is the ideal platform for dialogs and discussion, especially in specialist groups on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These media are also valuable sources of research and staying up-to-date with the latest news, developments, conferences and research in a research field.
| Content-sharing | Dialog | Monitoring |
| Own/Department Blog ResearchGate Academia.edu Online Science Youtube (e.g. vlogs) Twitter Facebook LinkedIn | Blogs ResearchGate Academia.edu Online Science Twitter LinkedIn Facebook | Blogs ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Online Science Twitter Groups LinkedIn Groups Facebook Groups |
SMAP strategies
There are a number of social media issues that need to be considered before effective strategies can be made and put into practice. Lu et al. (2021) compiled a list of best practices and advice from several scientists who are active on social media:
- Understand the platform: be aware that each one has a different type of audience and preferred communication type
- Assemble a social media team: allocate roles and make a consistent posting and engagement schedule
- Make appropriate online engagement strategies: 1. create an open and welcoming environment will encourage more engagement with your posts – make people feel successful at engaging with you; 2. tailor ideas and language to the target reader; 3. be responsive to comments
- Enhance communicative techniques for effective knowledge sharing: make core concepts accessible and easy to understand
- Maintain a code of professionalism: be careful about tone, ethics and confidentiality
- Be aware of potential pitfalls: understand the line between sharing and shameless self-promotion; being aware of copyright issues.
So, once these best practices are in the mind, it is time to set up a social media posting process and schedule. Hurrle and Postatny (2015) put forward an iterating COSMIC model, or cycle, to serve as a guideline (see Figure 1).
This cycle begins with understanding the context and observing the social media context, tone and types of content that attract engagement. From there, the researcher should be clear what her objectives are for using that platform. Some objectives include the following:
- stay updated with research, researchers, or institutions
- share initial research findings
- promote your lab or institution
- engage in research conversations with fellow researchers
- enter into science communication conversations with lay people, journalists, or policy makers
- Or, perhaps a combination of these.
Then, the appropriate content should be selected for the appropriate social media channel. To maximize reach and visibility, the same content can be recycled with modification for different channels. An example of this implementation might be blog post or article (on a personal or lab website) that serves as a hub for social media recycling to different audiences: the blog post content and link can be attached to a brief tweet on Twitter, summary on LinkedIn or Facebook, and a press release for department newsletters or newspapers. The social media publishing cycle for this piece of content does not end here. It is important to monitor engagement with these posts and respond quickly to comments and monitor who is “liking” or even sharing these posts. From monitoring engagement, you can see what seems to be working and getting more engagement on that platform and make corrections to future posts. It is a time consuming learning curve, but for research labs with young millennial grad students, the learning curve is not so steep.
Posting “valuable content”
Knowing the target audience of the different social media platforms and packaging the content accordingly is the key to engagement success that will enhance visibility and impact. Hurrle and Postatny (2015) illustrated the three elements that define the kind of “valuable content” that will naturally stimulate engagement (see Figure 2):
- Informative
- Entertaining
- Engaging.
Specifically, valuable content should contain all three aspects; in other words, it should be edutainment. However, these elements should also be authentic (the content creator has authority and credibility), relevant (to the audience), and consistent (in a posting schedule). For the last criterion, a publishing schedule should be set up.
These are some strategies that can be used by researchers to guide them towards more visibility and impact on altmetrics. The Open Science trend towards–and pressure for–more diverse forms of communication for researchers to new and broader audiences is unmistakable. The researchers and labs who more quickly align with this trend will surely profit and extend not only their personal and research influence but also knowledge of science to wider audiences.
References
Lu, D., Ruan, B., Lee, M., Yilmaz, Y., & Chan, T. M. (2021). Good practices in harnessing social media for scholarly discourse, knowledge translation, and education. Perspectives on medical education, 10(1), 23-32.
Hurrle, D., & Postatny, J. (2015). Social media for scientific institutions: How to attract young academics by using social media as a marketing tool. Springer.
