When I started using Twitter five years ago I had a simple goal in mind. I wanted to organize a symposium and I wanted relevant people to be there. So I started collecting followers first and then used my account to advertise my symposium. This strategy worked well for me and later on I also found many other ways in which Twitter can be useful and add value to my work as public health researcher. However, I often get surprised reactions from researchers who do not use Twitter that I am “wasting my time” with that. Of course Twitter can be a waste of time for people who get distracted on Twitter easily and keep reading and clicking until they realize that several hours have past. Here is a three step approach for using Twitter as a researcher without wasting your time.
Note that this is not a guide for how to use Twitter. Twitter is intuitive, so you can probably figure this out yourself. If not, there are guides available on how to set up an account, how to get followers, how to use hashtags, twitter terminology, and many more.
Step 1: Deciding whether you want to use Twitter (10 minutes)
- Think about pros and cons of using Twitter for your specific situation. If you are a newbie to using Twitter as a researcher then start with reading a blog about this (for example this one). Pros can be that you can follow interesting news and publications in your research field, that you can advertise your publications, call for papers, blogs, or job adverts, that you can easily connect with researcher whom you don’t (yet) know personally, and that you can ask questions and get quick answers. A possible con of using Twitter is that it takes time; it doesn’t have to be much time (as you can read below) and the pros can outweigh this con, but Twitter does take some time. Are you the type of person who would get lost in a Twitter feed during office hours while losing track of time? Then starting Twitter while you also have a very busy work schedule is probably not very smart and you can stop reading this post.
- If you think there could be more pros than cons for your specific situation, then take a look at twitter.com. Hit the search button and find some interesting people that you know (colleagues, famous researchers in your field, organizations that you like). Read a few of their tweets and retweets and decide whether you like what you see. You can also search for the hashtag (go here if you don’t know what this is) of a conference that you have or have not attended and read what other conference attendees have shared about their conference experience. You now have a good enough idea of what Twitter is like. If you think you like it, then go to step 2. If you don’t like it, then decide that you will not join Twitter and stop reading this post.
Step 2: Getting started (30-45 minutes)
- Depending on the goal you have with using Twitter, collecting lots of followers can be more or less important. If you only want to use Twitter to follow other people (not to advertise your work and get connected with others) you can skip the next bullet.
- Start with uploading a photo and writing a bio. There are blogs about how to choose the best profile picture and how to write a good bio, but you can also use common sense (this takes less time). Then write three tweets and post them. This may feel strange to do because you don’t have followers yet, so you are tweeting to nobody. However, when people decide whether they want to follow you, they look at your previous tweets to see whether you are interesting enough to follow. Therefore you need some tweets to start with.
- Start following some interesting people. There are two strategies if you don’t want to waste time on Twitter:
- Follow a small selection of people who tweet the kind of things that are very interesting for you. Be picky by checking out someone’s previous tweets before you decide to follow them. If only 10% of what someone tweets is interesting, then do not follow this person. Unfollow people if it turns out that they are not so interesting as you thought at first. This ensures that your timeline is always full of interesting information for you.
- Follow many potentially interesting people if you want to collect many followers yourself (again: this depends on the goals you have with using Twitter). If you follow someone, they get a notification and they may decide to follow you back. Retweeting or liking interesting tweets can also get their attention. If you follow this strategy and also want to read interesting stuff on Twitter without wasting too much time, you need lists. You can create a list easily and only add people who tweet the kind of things that are very interesting for you. Instead of reading your entire timeline you can just read the timeline of your list. This list can be kept private if you want, so people do not know whether they are on your list or not.
Step 3: Regular use (5 minutes per day)
- Posting tweets can be done very efficiently:
- Try to get a routine for posting certain things that you would normally email to your colleagues like interesting publications, conference announcements, call for papers, or job adverts. If you are already emailing someone a link then the extra effort of tweeting this is minimal.
- If you read something interesting on a news or journal website, you can often click on the Twitter icon of the article and the tweet is constructed automatically. This will only take you a few extra seconds.
- Tweet interesting things that you hear during conferences. You can do this during the conference presentation, so it won’t cost you any extra time. Also, you can tweet instead of making notes. Make sure to use the conference hashtag.
- The thing that can consume most of your time on Twitter is reading tweets of others. Do not try to read everything that everybody that you follow is tweeting. Read part of your timeline (or the timeline of your list) for only a few minutes each day or on some days, retweet something interesting and then stop. There are also apps that warn you when you spend too much time on Twitter (e.g. RescueTime or MeeTimer), but it is probably not a good sign if you need these.
Do you have anything to add? Post a comment!
[…] blog hoeft niet veel tijd te kosten. Als je het inbouwt in je routine, kost social media je maar een paar minuten per dag. Een blog kun je bijvoorbeeld schrijven nadat je een presentatie over je onderzoek hebt voorbereid. […]