Five Tips to Promote Your Research Using Social Media
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By Ciara Doyle
Social media is an important and effective tool to use when promoting your research as it offers a direct way to reach your audience and provides an ideal platform to raise the profile of your journal. As a journal editor or author, your subject expertise makes you ideally placed to promote your paper on social media. The below tips will give you a great jumpstart in learning how to utilise social media to engage the online community in your research.
1. Choose the right social media platform:
SAGE has developed guidelines that can help you determine which platforms to use and how to utilise each to their full potential. Think carefully about which networks fit your personality and intended audience, and most importantly make sure to commit to posting frequently about research and news in your field of study.
2. Build your community:
Building a substantial social media following can take time. At first, it may seem as if you’re only reaching a few fellow academics. But, according to a study in Facets, once an academic reaches around 1000 followers on Twitter they will increasingly reach a more varied audience including members of the public, media, applied organisations, and outreach groups – a great way to increase the readership of your paper!
3. Think about tone of voice:
It’s important to write in a clear, straightforward language. Technical details are important in your research paper, but when communicating with the wider community you want to present your findings in easy-to-understand terms. Frame your content in a way that explains why your audience should care, instead of just what your article is about. Consider linking directly to the abstract on SAGE Journals or an archive version.
4. Create compelling content:
Make sure your posts are engaging and compelling for your audience: use images to make your posts stand out; enhance discoverability by carefully researching and selecting relevant hashtags; mention handles to directly engage with others, especially co-authors, your university, the journal, society, or relevant SAGE Publishing handles. Incorporating these methods will help to increase the engagement, such as likes and retweets, you receive on your posts.
5. Engage with your audience:
Social media allows for open dialogue, so it’s important to engage with your audience. Make sure to respond to comments, answer questions, and thank those who create posts referring to your paper. Additionally, it can also be very beneficial to engage with accounts who don’t already follow you in order to spread awareness of your social media presence. These are the types of activities that will ignite conversations about your research. Plus, it will increase the article’s Altmetric score!
For further resources, check out this page on our Author Gateway: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/promote-your-article
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