I recently gave a hands-on workshop to graduate students in our department about using Twitter in science. As part of that workshop, I provided some bullet points about this social media tool, and I thought it might be useful to share these perspectives more broadly!

Twitter can be useful for:

• Filtering, accessing science stories relevant to your field of study (e.g., EurekAlert!, news media, science writers)
• Assisting with your career (job ads, getting to know potential colleagues/supervisors)
• Creating a research network
• Doing research
• Forging collaborations
• Attending conferences virtually
• Engaging with a broader audience (e.g. Directly or through journalists, media offices, science writers)
• Social justice, political change, activism
• Being inspired by great thinkers, innovators, writers, scientists etc
• Seeng the human side of science
• Becoming a better writer and science communicator
• Track the reach of your work (analytics)

When using Twitter as a scientist, here are some things to think about:

• What you might want to do on Twitter? (Learn? Engage? Have fun? Grow a following? Do research? Promote your work?). Craft your profile and approach based on these objectives (Note: this can change!)
• If your objectives are about science, find a balance between professional/personal (actually: ALWAYS think about this… And remember that “personal” is seldom completely private with social media tools)
• Don’t overwhelm your followers with self-promotion
• When tweeting try to “Be professional, and Be positive” (note: I learned this advice from Adam Taylor who runs #SciStuChat)
• You don’t have to Tweet to be on Twitter: Watch and learn before jumping in (many months, perhaps!)
• Curate who you follow carefully (Don’t be afraid to unfollow people)
• Don’t obsess about growing your own following: this will happen over time
• Don’t feel you have to read your entire feed: important and interesting content appears multiple times
• If you per objective is to share content, aim for information-rich tweets (links/photos etc)
• Use “draft” features – sometimes it’s good to write Tweets without sending them right away.
• Learn how to use Hashtags effectively (they are, essentially the “magnets” of the Internet)
• Own up to mistakes / apologize
• Give credit where it’s due, especially when thinking about sharing photos or art: ask permission before sharing!
• Curate content! (e.g. “Like” button, or better yet, another program – Pocket, Evernote) – it’s easy to forget about neat things you have seen on Twitter, so it’s important to find ways to save the things you may wish to find later on.

Caveats:

• Twitter can become a time-waster and great procrastination tool: learn to be careful with your use
• Often, your community ends up being limited to like-minded people
• It’s easy to get embroiled in debates and controversy: be careful
• Trolls can ruin everything; people can be jerks.
• Twitter is certainly not for everyone

There are heaps of other resources out there, and I do recommend checking out this page on Science Borealis.

Have things to add? Please comment, below!