Using Socia Media Effectively to Broadly Promote Your Research Online

Are you using social media already to promote your research? You should! Several studies have shown that social media promotion can improve and downloads of your article. You may notice that I don’t mention citations here…because that is not so clear. Just because your research is visible, does not necessarily mean it will be cited. That will depend more on the robustness of the study design, the significance of the results, and the relevance of the implications. However, getting your research visible in the first place is a great place to start! ????

Furthermore, using social media is an excellent way to broaden the visibility of your research beyond experts in your field. Experts will likely find your article on abstracting databases, as long as you are publishing in indexed journals and using keywords and search engine optimization to improve discoverability, something I discussed in detail in an earlier post (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/use-keywords-get-your-research-noticed-jeffrey-robens-bbrfc ).

Why would you want to share your research with a broader audience? It is a great way to attract attention from collaborators from other fields that may not necessarily find your research in their databases. And interdisciplinary research often yields really exciting and novel results! Furthermore, it is also an important way to educate the public. Most of the public (including policymakers) want to make better-informed decisions but are being exposed to a lot of misinformation online. By sharing the correct information with them, we can help prevent that.?

Let me share some useful tips to ensure that you are using social media effectively to maximize your impact.

Choose the appropriate platform

Depending on your target audience, one social media platform may be better than another. Here are some general guidelines:

• LinkedIn: Useful for an educated and professional audience
• Facebook: Useful for an older and broader audience
• Twitter/X: Useful for short posts/notifications and particularly a Japanese audience (they love Twitter in Japan)
• Instagram/YouTube/TikTok: Useful for pictures and videos and target a younger audience
• WeChat/Weibo/BiliBili: Useful for a Chinese audience

Build your network

While you can share publicly on most of the above platforms, your networks will be the primary audience (particularly for LinkedIn and WeChat, for the latter, you can only share with your network). So, having a broad network can help improve your reach. But you don’t want to just add anyone to your network, you need to be strategic. Add those that you feel add value to you. Those who share similar interests or can help you achieve your goals.

Send requests (with messages as to why you want to connect with them!) to relevant people, join groups that are related to your interests, and comment on public posts that you find interesting ensuring you are establishing your expertise related to the topic…which may lead to that person to send you an invitation to connect!

Be consistent

Many social media platforms reward consistent and frequent users. By ‘reward’ I mean broadens the reach of your posts to a wider audience. So, I encourage you to log into the social media platform for 10-15 minutes per day (or maybe 3 or 4 days a week, at least). When the platform sees you as a frequent user, they will likely share your posts more broadly.

Share your research ideas effectively

For platforms that allow longer posts, make sure you are engaging. If you cannot engage with the audience, they will likely not be interested in reading your post. I suggest a three-part strategy: engage - discuss - engage, or what I like to call an ‘engagement sandwich’.?

Let me share a post that helps to explain how to do this.

Engage: Start with one or two sentences that immediately get the attention of the audience. Usually, this will be the conclusion of your study. I know…in research articles, the conclusion comes last. But for social media (and more broadly science communication), it needs to come first. If the first one or two sentences don’t get your audience’s attention quickly, they will likely keep scrolling. People read social media fast. Further, keep this only two or three lines. Why? For long posts, the platform will collapse the post and only the first two or three lines will be visible unless readers click ‘see more’. So make sure those 1 or 2 sentences really engage the audience’s interest! Two useful strategies for doing this are:

• Use a question. This often can draw the audience in and pique their interest.
• Use second person (‘you’ or ‘we’): This shows the audience that your post is directly relevant to them.

For the above post, I used a question: “It's been shown that epidural electrical stimulation (EES) can restore the ability to walk after paralysis, but how does this occur? A new study may explain why.” And as you can see above, it is only 3 lines long, so it would be visible even when collapsed.

Discuss: Now that you have gotten the attention of your audience, hopefully, they will click on ‘see more’ and read the rest of your post. Discuss your research and where it was published. Also, highlight the one or two most important findings that support the conclusion you stated in the first paragraph. And please be sure to explain your findings without technical words. Remember, you are trying to broadly educate your audience. Even so…this paragraph will likely be a bit dry and technical…which means you are starting to lose your audience. Therefore, at the end of your post, you need to re-engage with them!

Engage: The third part of your post should demonstrate why your study is relevant to the audience or more broadly society. These are usually the implications of your study. This will help the audience understand why your study is valuable. And I suggest you end your post on a message of hope…everyone likes a happy ending!

For the above post, I tried to explain why this study is valuable to the reader and more broadly to society: “Although this is not a cure for paralysis yet, understanding how this recovery occurs at a cellular and molecular level will give us greater insights to develop therapies to help paralyzed people walk again.” And I ended on a positive note.???

My engagement sandwich:

Additional tips

You can use hashtags in your post…but they are becoming less relevant for the algorithms many social media platforms use. However, if people are following those hashtags, this can help direct your post into the relevant people’s feeds. So, it can’t hurt. I suggest putting the hashtags at the end of the post as they can be somewhat distracting when used in the text of the post.

Use images! Images really get people’s attention. When you share the link to your article, you will often get a preview image that will accompany the link. This should work well. Alternatively, you can take a screenshot of your article’s title or select an attractive image from your study to use instead.

Link to the article! Remember, you are trying to share your research…but you can only do that if you let people know where to find it! This is especially useful for Open Access articles as they are free for people to download and read.

Tag the publisher of your journal. Often publishers will like and/or comment on posts related to their journals (this is particularly true for Springer Nature and Nature Portfolio, but I am sure other publishers do this as well). This will further improve the reach your post will have. And sometimes, the publisher may even repost your post in their feed, which will really improve your reach!

For 15 minutes after you post:

• Do not edit your post (for LinkedIn, this will reduce reach for some reason)
• Engage with other posts in your network. Never just ‘post-and-go’! Engaging with other posts (particularly commenting) immediately after sharing your post will further broaden its reach.

Engage with comments on your post. Remember, you are trying to create a dialogue with the audience. So, if they comment on your post, be sure to like and comment back. Not only will this allow you to create a more effective network with relevant people, but will also further improve the reach of that post.

I hope these tips will help you more effectively use social media when sharing your research will help you improve your visibility and build your reputation in the field. Good luck! ??