If you want your work to be read, downloaded, and cited, you MUST promote it. So, what are some of the best ways you’ve seen an academic share their research work on social media? Here are 15 ideas from me…
Transcript:
Too often the social media posts that I see promoting research articles are basically, “Here’s an article I published. Go and check it out.” or “So excited to have my article accepted by journal”. There’s really no context. There’s no reason for me to get engaged. So here are 15 posts, and 17 image or video ideas that you can use to help your article.
So, you’ve got, “Here’s an awesome article I published, and so excited to publish article”. In both cases I think they’re not great, but they’re what most people use, and most people are comfortable with. So at least if you’re not already using those techniques, use those two. Every time you want to include a link to your article or some way for people to get access to it, and generally speaking that should be to a free version not a version behind a paywall.
You could go with, “Here’s an article I published on topic [X] with co-authors [ABC] in journal [Y].”
“If you like a previous article, you might like this article.”
“If you’re interested in this particular topic, you might want to read my article.”
“In doing research for my article, I found something interesting out, here’s what I found.”
“I used this particular method in the article, here’s the result that it gave me.”
“I was so excited to find the result, you can read about it more in my article.”
“I had to learn a method to get a result in a particular article, here’s a figure showing a result in an article.”
“Having found [X], we’re now working on why, what’s happening next?”
“Here’s a quote from the article, so you’ll have an actual quote. Do you agree? Read more in the article.”
“Without author or article or something else, I would not have been able to produce my article.”
“Author [X] was responsible for method [Y], and key to finding [Z].”
“So excited because I already mentioned that.”
“I’m so excited to publish article, and topic with journals with authors in journal.”
So, there are some topic ideas about 15 of them in terms of images. There are heaps of options. You can do a screenshot of the front page of the article. You can do a screenshot of the abstract of the article. You can do a photo of the article or a photo of just the abstract. A photo or a screenshot of the email or acceptance letter. Figures of the article. Make sure if you choose the go down the figures root that you just check that you haven’t signed away certain amounts of that to copyright. You can include picture of you collecting data. Picture of you analyzing data. Some kind of excitement or emoji or gif. Some kind of celebration emoji or gif. A screenshot of the highlighted portion of the article that you think is really important. A photo of a highlighted portion of the article that you think is really important. A photo of you being really excited. A photo of you celebrating.
You could even do a video of you reading a section aloud. So, there’s 17 different videos you could potentially include in your next post about your latest article. Yes! This all feels really yuck and it feels like self-promotion, and of course it is self-emotion. But the only way that you’ll get people to read, download, and cite your work is to put it out there in the public domain. Unfortunately, whether you like it or not social media is a major part of that now for researchers and the public in general.
So good luck getting your research out there.