Twitter Strategies

[Adapted from Jesse Strommel, "Promoting Open Access Publications and Academic Projects", http://hybridpedagogy.org/promoting-open-access-publications-and-academic-projects/.]

How to Promote an Academic Project or Publication

Before you can successfully promote an article, post, or project, you have to build a network. To do this:

1. Start by following, friending, or adding to circles relevant users on whichever social media networks you feel most comfortable. Focus on quality, not quantity. Perhaps curate your feed, for example, to include a wide variety of perspectives, folks you respect, not just folks you agree with. Real engagement doesn’t happen in an echo-chamber.

2. Follow enough people, but be careful not to follow just for the sake of following. When creating a new account on Twitter, I suggest following about 50 people to start. Twitter doesn’t really work as a network until you’ve reached a certain tipping-point.

3. Don’t follow and unfollow aggressively. Engagement requires genuine listening not just following or friending to create a bigger network.

4. Share relevant information, retweet your peers, but post substantively. Don’t post about the same article or project more than a couple times without offering more information, a quote, additional context, etc. Avoid posting the same thing on multiple channels without tweaking for the specific audience.

5. On Twitter, I advise using the “retweet” button so tweets only appear once in your follower’s feeds, decreasing clutter and keeping the attention focused on the original tweeter rather than yourself. Use the “RT” method sparingly when you want to amend a tweet.

6. The “reply” button on Twitter nests your tweet with others, so anyone reading the conversation will see your remark in context. The “reply” button helps make Twitter more about dialogues and less about 140-character monologues.