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Advancing your Career with Social Media: Why social media?

Resources for students and researchers interested in using social media platforms for networking, information management and promoting their research through nontraditional channels.

Using Social Media for Job Searches and Networking

Social networking plays an important role in job searches. Well developed profiles are the first step and creating a strong network pays off when you are looking for a job. Those seeking highly skilled and well paid positions benefit most from active use of their social networks. It pays to develop strong connections through regular engagement such as posting, contributing to discussions and offering help to others when you can.

Why Use Social Media as an Academic?

Using social media can benefit you as a researcher by making your work accessible to a much wider audience than the one that reads technical journals. Blogging and Tweeting about your published work has been shown to be very effective at creating greater interest and more downloads from an open repository. Succinctly communicating the importance of your work and your findings on social media can also improve your other technical communications. See this recent post from "Inside Higher Ed" about effective use of social media.

Guidelines for Using Social Media for Promoting your Research

Consider these guidelines for using social media to promote your research:

  • Follow key people in your field or whose work may impact your own

  • Post regular updates on your projects using relevant hashtags

  • Use pictures and videos to make them eye-catching

  • Shorten hyperlinks to make them shorter and more meaningful using sites such as bitly.com or tinyurl.com

  • Provide links to your social media profiles on your research homepage

  • Use Atmetrics to measure your research impact through social media mentions

Using Social Media for Managing Information Overload

Researchers face the challenge of absorbing a continually increasing volume of information in order to stay abreast of new developments in their field.  Social media can be a short cut that allows you to use your network to share information in a summarized form and sidestep information that has little value.

From Social Media:  A Guide for Researchers  https://derby.openrepository.com/handle/10545/196715