Social media communication for researchers: strategy & training

What is social media communication for researchers?

Globalization and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) has led to the situation where there have never been so many researchers competing for publishing in high impact journals. There have also never been so  many journals and publications. Researchers – especially junior ones — are facing a marketing crisis: how to make my research more visible to more people?

The answer: social networks and publishing platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Research Gate, blogs, to name just a few.

Fortunately, with some knowledge, coherent strategy, and persistent effort, researchers can find not only their target niche readers in their field, but wider audiences, too. There have never been so many distribution channels and platforms for knowledge and digital tools to target certain readers to increase research impact and to create opportunities for networking and research collaboration.

Academic social media engagement: the whys and why nots 

A social media strategy for broader research dissemination has the following goals and benefits:

• Raise research visibility and impact
• Enhance researcher reputation as well as their team’s and institution’s and also nation’s reputation
• Create opportunities to network with relevant researchers for friendship and collaboration opportunities 
• Educate the general public on methods and outcomes of research in this time knowledge skepticism.

With so many good reasons, you may be wondering why more researchers don’t undertake social media communication? There are at least 5 reasons to explain this: researchers …

1. Lack time  in an already busy research, teaching and administrative schedule
2. Lack confidence in the value of academic social media  
3. Lack confidence to communicate on social media 
4. Lack the communication skills to communicate effectively 
5. Lack a strategy or plan of action.

There are persuasive arguments for the usefulness of social media communication which should similarly address concerns about investing a lot of time with no return. Unfortunately, there is a mistaken belief that academic social media is frivolous and unprofessional, like popular posting on Instagram and Facebook. As for reasons 3-5, these complaints can be remedied with one solution: education and training. 

Training for academic social media communication 

The above mentioned goals and benefits can be realized with the right strategy and right communication training. But this training is not the usual type of training that most graduate students experience. Typically, graduate students are directly and indirectly indoctrinated into academic writing and presenting in the process of 

• taking writing courses, 
• completing seminar assignments, 
• perhaps publishing and presenting papers at conferences, and much less typically, 
• getting some mentoring from caring supervisors. 

And when researchers mature and enter the publishing game, they learn to write book review articles, journal/conference submission letters, response-to-reviewers letters, funding applications, and reviewer reports when asked by a journal to review a manuscript. These highly formalized genres differ from the more informal social media genres.

Social media communication, in contrast, comprises various genres of communication that differ in length, style, structure and content from regular research papers or lab reports. Some of these genres include the following:

• Short articles on current research
• Press releases 
• Summaries and updates on research 
• Curated content (ie posting someone else’s article or blog posts) with summaries and comments
• Commenting on other people’s posts
• Infographics summarizing ideas or research
• Self-introduction and bios for social media profile pages
• Networking Messages to fellow researchers or journalists.

Most of these genres are much more conversational in tone and simpler in language and conceptual structure. When writing for a target reader outside your research niche, like researchers in another field or the general interested public, the most difficult thing for most researchers is to explain their research concepts, methods and significance in plain English, or whatever language they are using. This means crawling out of the deep hole in the ground that is your research area and trying to imagine what others don’t know. This is exceedingly difficult and is referred to as “the curse of knowledge”: the assumption that readers’ have enough background knowledge to understand your research. This in itself requires a lot of training and is not formally taught in most graduate programs.

Training for understanding and plain communication

Traditional academic communication training focuses on a reader familiar with the research field. After all, who else would read a journal article or attend a conference talk in your niche field? This results in unintelligible prose for most of the world’s population. And for many academics, this leads to at best a reliance on technical terms and concepts, and at worst, an inability to unpack the layers of knowledge and concepts contained in a technical term. To be able to do the latter requires training that would follow physicist Richard Feynman’s personal method of testing his own understanding. This method is now referred to as the Feynman Learning Technique and it contains 4 steps:

1. Pretend to teach a concept you want to learn to a student in the sixth grade
2. Identify the holes in your explanation and go back to the source material to better understand it
3. Organize and simplify the ideas
4. Transmit and communicate. 

This is very difficult and is not emphasized in graduate training because it is assumed everyone you communicate with understands – or should understand – the language and concepts. In reality, this is not always (not often?) the case, but most are too embarrassed to admit it. An unfortunate result of this face issue is that it is often sufficient that graduate students learn the discourse and technical language of their field, and develop the ability to know in what situations to use what terms. However, for social media communication, researchers in other fields or the general public will not understand this discourse, which will need to be translated into plain English, which, ironically, further requires a deeper conceptual understanding. And if the knowledge is not communicated simply and clearly, social media readers will not pause to ask for clarification; they will also not be embarrassed; they will simply stop reading and ignore your post!

So, if communicating to a larger audience on social media is taken seriously, then graduate training should first include Feynman’s Learning Technique. This is valuable in itself because it pushes researchers to understand concepts and processes and a more fundamental level. Second, graduate training will need to teach different reader expectations, different genres for different social networking platforms, and simpler language use. 

Training for different platforms and making a publishing schedule

The next step involves targeting the right social media platforms for the visibility and impact goals. For individual researchers – especially for junior researchers in the solitary humanities, education and social sciences fields – this demand on time is considerable. However, for research teams in the sciences, a publishing strategy and schedule is much more feasible because a division of labor can be diffused throughout the team. 

There are many social media platforms that can be exploited to communicate to a broad audience, from academic (inside and outside your niche research field) to more general, layperson audiences. The following table below lists a number of possible platforms with their target audience and post type and a possible posting frequency is added for your reference. However, regardless of regular or academic social media, if you want to build connections and followers, frequent and consistent posting and engaging with people are essential.

Platform	Media	Viewership	Posting type	Posting Frequency
Youtube	Video	General	Vlog, tutorial, lectures	weekly-monthly
TikTok	Video	General	Vlog, tutorial	At least weekly
Wikipedia	Text	General – academic	Articles, sentences/paragraphs in your field (cite your work)	As needed
Newspapers and mags.	Text	General – local or int’l paper	Articles, Op Ed opinion pieces	Monthly
Personal website/Blog, (see good examples)	Text, photo, video	General – academic	Articles, lit reviews, critiques & opinions, research methods and experiences, conference summaries, etc	Weekly
dept/institution webpage	Text, video	General – academic	Articles, lit reviews, conference summaries, etc	Weekly
Twitter	Text	General – niche	Short, pithy posts,  comments	2-3x per week
LinkedIn	Text or video	General – niche	Summary posts, comments, articles	weekly
Reddit	Text	very niche (subreddits)	Questions, answers to questions	As needed
Google Scholar	Text	Academic, mostly	Research articles, published and unpublished (make sure it is in pdf form)	As needed
ResearchGate	Text	Academic: General – niche	Published/unpublished papers and articles	2+/year
Impactio	Text	Academic: General – niche	Published/unpublished papers and articles	2+/year
Academia.edu	Text	Academic: General – niche	Published/unpublished papers and articles	2+/year

To lighten the workload, there are social media scheduling apps, like Hootsuite and Buffer, that can allow you to schedule posts weeks or months in advance.  There are also several other less obvious social media outlets, like Instagram, and newer ones like the audio-based Clubhouse, that may help promote research visibility. Depending on whether your target audience are in specific groups within these platforms, they might also be platforms worth exploring. 

Not enough time …?

Yes, the above list of publishing venues and suggested frequencies looks daunting. It is unlikely that any team can cover all of these areas (or would want to!), but there are 3 three things to keep in mind to make a social media strategy more feasible:

1. Dividing the labor,
2. Allocating tasks based on interest, and most importantly, 
3. Recycling content. 

Firstly, tasks and deadlines can be assigned to different team members. Ideally, these tasks can coincide with the preferred medium of the team member: if the team member enjoys making videos or vlogs, then Youtube, TikTok and LinkedIn would be more appropriate, or if writing is preferred, then blogs or press releases or newspaper Op Ed (Opposite Editorial, or opinion) articles relating to current events. As for the third point, the same message or article can be recycled in different media and packaged according to the medium’s structure and target audience expectations. For most social media content creators, the blog serves as a content hub and can be reformatted for other platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, or Youtube. 

How to maximize the return on investment: executing strategy, building audiences and quality control 

Once effort has been invested in creating a strategy, publishing/deadline schedule and roles, even more effort must be placed on overseeing the following:

• consistently executing the strategy, 
• building audiences, and 
• Producing content of value. 

A social media project manager is essential. This person needs to set up deadlines and make sure they are met. Keeping track of publication links on an Excel file can also help with this and set up accountability (many tanks to Sue Ellson for sharing this spreadsheet). 

But even the execution of the strategy is the tip of the iceberg: the real art and science of increasing research visibility and impact involves what we might crudely call academic marketing. This means building a network of connections and followers, which often necessarily involves being proactive by seeking out and connecting with the relevant individuals on social media and engaging with them and especially their posts. It could take years of consistent publishing and networking in the form of 

1. joining relevant research and interest groups, and  
2. engaging with other researchers’ posts (likes, comments and shares) to put yourself on their radar. 

And finally, perhaps the biggest part of the invisible iceberg is the quality of the content. If the content is not interesting for the audience, it will not be read and there will be little, if any, increased impact. Careful thought is required to reach different audiences and find ways to make your research or field relevant or interesting to them. To accomplish this, you can frequently read the social media “thought leaders” in your research field and notice and emulate how they effectively package their content and message. Social media writing skills and appreciation for posting formats can maximize your chances for making your post and its content stand out. Thought provoking questions and quick summaries of useful/interesting content will lead to more clicks on your post and engagement. Even researchers’ attention on social media or academic social media is, like everyone else’s, in short supply.

Training progressions social media skill building  

For those just getting started on academic social media, it would be advisable to become familiar with one platform at a time. Twitter is a good place to start, because the tweets are only 240 characters in length. Although short, it is difficult to write an engaging, witty and/or thought-provoking tweet. Then longer form posts can be made on LinkedIn all the while working up to a weekly or biweekly blog. With any of these platforms, it is important to have one source where you want to drive social media traffic. For example, you could tweet about or write a LinkedIn summary for a blog article (which in itself may refer to your publication or conference paper),  and link them to the blog article and attach the link to direct traffic to your blog website.   

Researchers can learn how to effectively write and post on social media by themselves with informal research and frequent reading of academic social media. Or, departments or research team leaders can arrange courses, workshops or designated in-house staff to plan strategy and practice writing for various platforms. Courses and workshops can provide opportunities for researchers to practice writing shorter pieces of content, improve their writing and communication skills, and start (getting used to) publishing.  

Quantifying increased visibility?

It may be hard to directly quantify the return on this form of research dissemination. We can assume that with consistent publishing of quality content and persistent networking, research citations will increase. There will likely be a correlation but it could be difficult to gather the quantifiable evidence to show causation. However, it will be what can be more easily quantified is the dissemination of research ideas and papers by using Altmetrics that can track a research paper’s dissemination outside of scholarly journals by crawling other internet platforms like Wikipedia, ResearchGate, and social media.  

In conclusion, frequent and consistent content production, audience building and social media writing can be — and should be — part of the training of graduate students in the 2020s. The vast number of potential benefits are hard to ignore: 1. help promote you as a researcher, your team, your research, and your research institution, 2. help build your research and community networks for potential research collaboration, and 3. help promote understanding of your research outside your field and outside of the narrow confines of research, thereby paying back to society who as taxpayers have been indirectly funding your research.