Do you use twitter? How do you feel about it?

[ooglyboo]

Hi all. I am being encouraged by colleagues to get on to Twitter. The context is that I do quite a lot of impact work but currently do not publicise it very well.

Colleagues (well actually, one in particular!) at other institutions are getting much more publicity than me on a subject on which we are genuinely equally expert partly (though not only) because they have a very large social media following.

The thing is I am not on any social media at all. As an introvert who nevertheless does quite a lot of public engagement/public speaking, the thought of taking that additional step horrifies me. I am not someone who tends to draw attention to myself (I have never even been on Facebook) and the thought of trying to do so on Twitter is just horrible. Has anyone else overcome this fear to become a Twitter regular?

l love twitter. l've been on there 10 years. When l moved 100 miles away from my home town and didn't know a soul, the twitter friends who lived here became my 'real life ' friends. And still are, nearly 7 years on.
Twitter can be as anonymous or real as you make it. lt can be very good for publicity if you choose to use it for that. l appreciate if you don't currently use social media, you could find it daunting, but you're using Mumsnet! Which is social media.
Give it some thought. lf you'd like any help or want to ask anything, please feel free to message me. Good luck!

Hi Katseyes thanks for responding. Yes, Mumsnet is social media - but anonymous! My concerns about Twitter - which I would only be using to generate publicity / a 'following' - are that amongst other stuff I would have to curate it, generate content, news, etc. Not all of that can be what I am doing, so that might make me look unproductive. But I would also have to curate and collect news in the general area of what I do I suppose. Aaargh, so time consuming and so not what I would like to spend my time doing. I am torn though - my tendency is to let the work speak for itself but I know that doesn't happen in real life. I hate putting my head above the parapet and shouting about myself. But then I see this colleague forging ahead and that honestly annoys the hell out of me. I have to sort this out.

Interested to see responses here. I have recently had to step back from social media because it just gives me so much stress: no drama, nothing 'bad' going on, but as an introvert I find that having my words out there and then responded to, for example, overnight, makes me feel like I'm still 'socialising' for all that time, and its exhausting. I'm always wondering what someone might be reading or saying, even if it's just wondering if my Mum saw the photo of DD I posted!

I don't think I could possibly manage twitter, but I understand it could be very beneficial. I have heard that there are things that enable you to queue up lots of tweets and send them out regularly, so you maybe only have to do it once/week or so - but that would require having not time-sensitive stuff, and of course, you wouldn't be responding dynamically.

Academic Twitter can be good for building your profile, being in your community and disseminating work. I wouldn't use it if you work in a very controversial area likely to attract a lot of hate. I don't use it that much any more, I feel it is like an echo-chamber of similar colleagues and I can't quite get to the other ones! I do pop papers on there when they come out though at the very least.

Thanks everybody. I feel a bit sad about this world in which we all have to be extroverts, shouting about our work, in order to get noticed. I don't know ... my area is marginally controversial for sure. Politically. I guess it could attract some hate but weirdly I am not worried about that. My research has had previous publicity and I have read enough below the line comments to have developed a relatively thick skin in that respect I think. What I find difficult about it I think is this idea that I sort of need to put myself at the centre of the debate I write about and big myself up - rather than the research. Maybe I'm just out of date. Almost certainly!

ooglyboo Sorry for late response, l've just seen your reply! l totally understand what you mean. My twitter account is personal, and l'm anonymous on there. My friends know who l am, but not all of my followers. l do that on a 'need to know' basis.
Obviously if you were using it for work you'd need to be transparent about your business. Would you feel comfortable consulting with your colleague and getting some information about how they use it? l can imagine at first it would feel awkward and time consuming, but l think that would get easier the more you used it.
Would it be possible for you to use it under the 'umbrella' of your business, rather than having personal details on there? That way it might feel less intrusive?

I've had this same quandry with impact. I've opted to stay off Twitter for now. I too am an introvert and quite neurotic so I worry about everything I write and how it might be interpreted so the whole experience is exhausting. It's also very time consuming from what I gather - colleagues that have built a good Twitter profile have told me it requires tweeting 5-6 times a day to begin with to build followers and then maintaining it. I just haven't got that much to say!

It is completely possible just to hang out occasionally on Twitter, you don't need to tweet 5/6 times a day, honest! I don't tweet much at all at present but when I did, it was about once or twice a week, often just retweeting someone else's tweet or responding to one written. It depends if others in your sub-discipline are on there, in mine they certainly are as it is also a policy field. If you add people to your profile, they will add you- so you don't have to be prolific or show-offy yourself to still benefit from it.

Can look at feeds of people like Peter Gleick, Jim Alkalili, Adam Rutherford & Brian Cox to see academics who promote science & sometimes politics, too, if they fancy. See how they style their feeds.

Personally, I've got way too many personal opinions that would get in way of my science msgs.

Yes, for academics, I think Twitter is really important. I’m not big on social media (have very locked down Facebook and Instagram accounts for sharing photos with family and friends who live far away on the other side of the world), but Twitter is really useful in academia. I’ve done a lot of networking through it and have raised my profile in the UK (not where I did my PhD) considerably through it. I’m also pretty sure I probably got my most recent (quite prestigious) position because I ‘knew’ one of the project PIs on Twitter from a workshop we both went to years ago. My name was recognisable to her and I was able to glean a lot about the job through her posts that helped me prepare.

Beyond that, it’s really useful for finding out about conferences and funding calls that I might not have otherwise sought out.

You don’t have to be super boasty on it though. I do lots of reading of what others post and retweeting but only post things occasionally. It’s still really beneficial though.

Thanks so much everybody. Time to stop moaning and get on to it I guess. Busy this week .. so perhaps next!

What's worked for me is keeping it solely for academic purposes, and then friending colleagues/other academics whose work I'm interested in, so it doesn't overlap with my more personal (but locked down) FB account. You aren't going to get Ariana Grande's 140 something million followers that way but you can keep a tight circle of academic colleagues, so it's really a form of networking.

i'm also an introverted academic but on twitter i've built up a fair number of followers. I only tweet once a week or less, and only academic things, e.g. here is a phd position / new paper / conference etc. You don't have to post your opinions or what you had for breakfast etc.

As an introvert, it is best to start by following people. I mainly follow other academics and it is a very useful way to pick up news about papers / events etc that I might otherwise miss in the endless stream of journal tables-of-contents.

i've never been on twitter with the aim of getting lots of followers, but if you want to gain followers, then some things that help are (1) posting jobs / events / conferences that people want to know about & will retweet, and (2) getting retweeted by the 'big names' in your field. if any of them are friends in real life, you can ask for a retweet.

I love twitter. I rarely respond to debates, though - I use it to signal boost my own stuff (eg., it's great for getting CFPs out there), but also retweet other people's CFPs and share colleagues' work/little cheerful details. I think if you use it in a way that is colleagial rather than self-centred, it becomes a much nicer space. And you soon get a feeling for which other people in your field want to tweet 'look at this great postdoc opportunity with my lovely colleague' or 'here's a great funding opportunity for your students' rather than getting into endless antagonistic discussions.

I would start off like this, rather than by thinking you have to self-promote from the word go and every hour of the day. Do a little bit, make a community, and you'll end up quietly building up supportive colleagues who'll do a lot of the publicising for you (as you do for them).

I personally can't be bothered with it. However! In the age of the student being glued to their phones I provide my Twitter ID to them and tweet anything up to date and relevant on my topic and they seem to quite like this. I follow relevant folks but don't tweet any of my own thoughts and so on.

it's fantastic for networking, debating, meeting like-minded (or the opposite...) people.

I find it both useful and entertaining, though sometimes terrifying - it can be a hateful place. My interests are diverse and niche and it's helped me integrate them and make good contacts. I also think I'm part of Quiet Academic Twitter which is temperate and scholarly, not like the warriors and self-promoters. So I would like more of us who are like that, who send quiet signals out rather than going on and on.

But I think I find it easy to do and understand many colleagues don't; they find it draining, in which case you have to think about whether it's a good use of time. A lot of my engagement is done when on the bus when I wouldn't really be doing anything very productive.