How to use blogging and microblogging to disseminate your research

Tweeting or blogging can help you publicize your work and expand your network

By Elsevier Early Career Resources     Posted on 10 December 2012

Blogs and microblogs (e.g., Twitter)
are vital tools for academics to publicly communicate about research
developments and findings, to announce publications and share
presentations and to write about relevant research issues. You can also
gain feedback from other like-minded academics, as well as expand your
networks and enhance your visibility.

Increased
visibility online helps your offline recognition. Readers of your blog
and microblogs learn more about who you are as a person, and as a
researcher and professional. As a result, you may even be offered new
academic and professional opportunities, including offers to give
presentations or speeches and invitations to contribute blog posts or
articles to various online or offline publications.

In short,
blogging and microblogging greatly supplement the offline methods of
research dissemination and networking. They are critical online methods
for communicating and engaging with a massive global network of
researchers and peers.

The how-tos of blogging and microblogging

Blogging

Blogs
are proven to be effective in disseminating your research. You can
promote in-depth conversation via your blog. You build awareness about
your research and publications by sharing information and responding to
feedback from other researchers.

Create a blog and write regular
blog updates to tell about your research undertakings and other related
topics of interest to you. Provide links to your Elsevier and other
journal articles and publications. Readers can follow and subscribe to
your posts and leave comments.

Blogging basics

• Choose a blogging platform from one of the many available.
• Think
  of a domain name (url) you would like your blog to have. You can use
  your name or initials, or a keyword from your research.
• Select a suitable theme for the purposes of your blog.
• Complete a brief profile in the available section from which new readers can learn a little about you and your research.
• Create a title for the blog which simply summarizes the main focus of your expected posts.
• Once
  you have decided on a focus for your blog, such as a particular
  research topic or general topics within your fields of expertise, plan
  to write at least 1 blog post a week.
• Invite friends and colleagues from your network to follow your blog.
• Read
  and follow blogs of other academic peers, and leave comments as
  relevant, to drive more readers (who hopefully then become followers) to
  your own blog.
• Share links to blog posts in all of your social media outlets.
• Through
  tools offered in your blogging platform, you can analyze how many
  readers find your blog through tweets and other social media outlets.

Microblogging

Microblogging
is the shorter form of blogging. The most popular microblogging site is
Twitter. This form of social information sharing is also a brief and
effective way to announce research and publications, as well as to
attract attention to your website and blog. You can attach documents,
images or videos to your microblogging posts.

Twitter

Twitter
gives you a chance to share quick thoughts, statements and
announcements with followers, using no more than 140 characters. It is a
great way to quickly share your current research, publications,
opinions, questions, and links to new blog posts. You can follow other
researchers and thereby increase your own following.

Twitter basics

• Create a username and profile. Write a short profile about yourself indicating your research and academic background.
• Start
  writing posts, called tweets, which are relevant to your research,
  publications, areas of expertise, affiliations, events, etc.
• Look
  for other academics and professionals within your relevant field to
  follow on Twitter. By following them and commenting on their posts, you
  increase the number of followers of your own tweets. Be patient, it
  takes time to build up a significant number of followers.
• Use hash tags (#) in front of keywords to aid with indexing of the topics on
• which you write and to increase attention to your tweets on those and related keywords.
• Try to write at least 1 tweet per day. With regular tweets, you will ensure more followers.

Share your posts on other social media outlets

After writing a blog post, share the posts via other social media outlets to maximize the outreach of your messages. Use LinkedIn, Facebook, academic social networks like Academia.edu,
and others, to spread the updates. You can connect Twitter with your
other social media profiles so that tweets are posted on them as soon as
you tweet.

By utilizing the many social media outlets to
broadcast your blog and microblog posts, you can acquire more
'followers' and increase the readership of your blog, publications, and
increase your visibility.

SEO for blogs

Using relevant
keywords in your blog posts increases traffic to your blog site, and
relatively to your publications as well. You can discover which keywords
to use that are most relevant to the blog post topic by using the Google AdWords keyword tool.

By
using a few keywords in a single post enables your blog posts and
referenced publications with similar keywords to gain higher ranking in
the search engines. Specifically, your publications and posts appear
higher in a list of search engine results and are thus more likely to be
read. Do not overuse keywords to the point that it compromises the flow
of the blog post text.

Ethical considerations

It is
important to remember that a blog post, tweet or another microblog
update is public. Even using privacy settings is not a definitive way to
limit access to your posts. Thus, when writing a post or tweet, keep in
mind the possible impact on not only your reputation, but also the
potential impact on your institution, your constituents, affiliations,
and more. You do not want to share a post with information that can be
interpreted as challenging or jeopardizing the position and views, or
exposing secrets, of your relevant affiliations.