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Social media marketing for researchers: How to promote your publications and reach the right people

Published by Joni on April 16, 2017

Last updated on July 5, 2017

Today the Social Computing group at Qatar Computing Research Institute had the pleasure of listening to the presentation of Luis Fernandez Luque about social media marketing for researchers. Luis talked about how to promote your publications and personal brand, as well as how to reach the right people on social media with your research.

Luis is one of the most talented researchers I know, and a very good friend. He has two amazing girls and a great wife. You can follow Luis’ research on health informatics on Slideshare, Twitter, and of course connect with him on LinkedIn.

In this post, I’ll summarize some points of his presentation (if you want the full thing, you need to ask him :), and reflect them on my own experiences as a digital marketer.

Without further ado, here are 7 social media tips for researchers.

1. Upload your articles to the 3 big social media platforms for researchers

According to Luis, there are three major social media sites for researchers. These are:

You should post your papers on each of these platforms to get extra visibility. According to Luis, the point is to disseminate content in existing platforms because they have the critical mass of audience readily available. This is preferable to starting your own website from scratch and trying to attract visitors.

However, I recommend doing both. In addition to sharing your research on social media, you can have a separate websites for yourself and dedicated websites for your research projects. Having dedicated websites with a relevant domain provides search-engine optimization (SEO) benefits. In particular, websites are indexed better than social media sites which means you have a better chance of being found. Your papers will get indexed by search engines and therefore will attract occasional hits, depending on your chosen keywords and competition for them (see point number 4).

For the same reason you want to effectively cross-link and cross-post your content. For example, 1) publish the post in your own website, 2) re-publish it on LinkedIn, and 3) share on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ (as well as researcher social networks, if it’s academic content, but here I’m referring to idea posts or popularized articles). Don’t forget Google+, because occasionally those posts show up in search results. Sharing can be repeated and schedule by using BufferApp. For example, I have all my LinkedIn articles mirrored at jonisalminen.com.

Finally, besides your research papers, consider sharing your dissertation as well as Bachelor/Master theses. Those are often easier to read and reach a wider audience.

2. Recycle content and ideas

Luis mentioned he was able to increase the popularity of one of his papers by creating a Slideshare presentation about it. This principle is more commonly known as content tree in inbound marketing. I completely agree with Luis’ advice – it is often straight-forward and fast to create a presentation based on your existing paper, because you already know what you want to say.

If you have conference presentations or teaching material readily available, even better. For example, I’ve shared all my digital marketing lectures and teaching material at Slideshare, and they steadily attract views (tens of thousands in total so far). Here is an example of a presentation I made based on the post you’re reading. As you can see, it has an interesting title that aims to be “search-engine optimized”. By scrolling down, you also notice that Slideshare converts the presentation also into pure text. This is good for search-engine visibility, and one reason why Slideshare presentations rank well in Google. The picture from my Slideshare Analytics shows many people find the presentations through Google.

Figure 1 Slideshare Analytics showing large share of search traffic.

Luis also mentioned including the name of your publication in the title slide which is a good idea if you want to catch more citations from interested readers.

3. Create an online course

MOOCs and other forms of online education form a great way for disseminating your ideas and making your research more well known. Luis mentioned two platforms for this:

The point is to share knowledge and at the same time mention your own research. I think Luis mentioned he had at some point 4,000 participants for his course which is a very large audience and shows the power of online courses compared to traditional classrooms (I think I had maximum 100 students in my course, so you can see how big the difference in reach is).

4. Choose the right title

This is like copywriting for researchers. The title plays an important role for two reasons: 1) it determines whether people become interested and click forward to reading your paper, and 2) it can increase or decrease your chances of being found in Google. A straight analogy is journalism: you want some degree of click-bait in your title, because you are competing against all other papers for attention. However, in my experience many scholars pay little attention to the attractiveness of the title of their paper from the clicker’s perspective, and even fewer perform keyword research (the post in Finnish) to find out about popularity of related keywords.

So, how to choose the title of a research paper?

  1. Research & include relevant keywords
  2. Mention the problem your research deals with

The title should be catchy (=attractive) and include keywords people are using when they are searching information on the topic, be it research papers or just general knowledge. Luis’ tip was to include the problem (e.g., diabetes) in the title to get more downloads. Moreover, when sharing your papers, use relevant hashtags. In the academia, the natural way is to identify conference hashtags relating to your topic — as long as it’s relevant, using conference hashtags to promote your research is okay.

You can use tools such as Google Keyword Planner and Google Trends for keyword research. To research hashtags, Twitter’s recommendation feature is an easy approach (e.g., in TweetDeck you get recommendations when you start writing a hashtag). You can also use tools such as Hashtagify and Keyhole to research relevant hashtags. Finally, also include the proper keywords in your abstract. While full papers are often hidden behind gateways, abstracts are indexed by search engines.

5. Write guest blogs

Instead of trying to make a go with your own website (which is admittedly tough!), Luis recommended to write guest posts in a popular blogs. The rationale is the same as in the case of social media platforms: these venues already have an audience. As long as the blog deals with your vertical, the audience is likely to be interested in what you say. For content marketers, getting quality content is also a consistent source of concern, so it is easy to see a win-win here.

For example, you can write to research foundation blog. In case they gave you money, this also serves to show you are actively trying to popularize your research, and they get something in return for their money! Consider also industry associations (e.g., I haven’t come around to it yet, but I would like to write to IAB Finland’s blog since they have a large audience interested in digital marketing).

6. Define your audience

Luis advised to define your audience carefully – it is all about determining your area of focus and where you want to make an impact. On social media, you cannot control who sees your posts, but you can increase the chances of reaching the right people by this simple recipe:

  1. Find out who are the important people in your field
  2. Follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn
  3. Tag them to posts of both platforms.

The last point doesn’t always yield results, but I’ve also had some good experiences by including the Twitter handle of a person I know is working on the topic I’m writing about. Remember, you are not spamming but asking for their opinion. That is perfectly fine.

7. Track and optimize

This is perhaps the most important thing. Just like in all digital marketing, you need to work on your profile and social media activity constantly to get results. The competition is quite high, but in the academia, not many are fluent with social media marketing. So, as long as you put in some effort, you should get results relatively easier than in the commercial world! (Although, truth be told, you are competing with commercial content as well.)

How to measure social media impact?

  • choose metrics
  • set goals
  • track & optimize

For example, you could have reads/downloads as the main KPI. Then, you could have the goal of increasing that metric +30% in the next six months. Then, you would track the results and act accordingly. The good thing about numbers and small successes is that you become addicted. Well, this is mostly a good thing because in the end you also want to get some research done! But as you see that your posts get some coverage, it encourages to carry on. And gradually you are able to uplift your social media impact.

A research group could do this as a whole by giving somebody the task to summarize social media reach of individuals + the group as a whole. It would be fairly easy to incentivize good performance, and encourage knowledge sharing on what works. By sharing best practices, the whole group could benefit. Besides disseminating your research, social media activity can increase your citations, as well as improve chances for receiving funding (as you can show “real impact” through numbers).

The tool recommended by Luis is called Altmetric which is specifically tailored for research analytics. I haven’t used it before, but will give it a go.

Conclusion

The common theme is sharing your knowledge. In addition to just posting, you can also ask and answer questions on social media sites (e.g., on ResearchGate) and practitioner forums (e.g., Quora). I was able to beat my nemesis Mr. Valtteri Kaartemo in our Great Dissertation Downloads Competition by being active on Quora for a few weeks. Answering Quora questions and including a link in the signature got my dissertation over 1,000 downloads quickly, and since some question remain relevant over time, it still helps. But this is not only about competitions and your own “brand” but about using your knowledge to help others. Think of yourself as an asset – the society has invested tremendous amounts of time, effort and money into your education, and you owe it to the society to pay some of it back. One way to do that is sharing your knowledge on social media.

I still remember one professor saying a few years ago she doesn’t put her presentations on Slideshare because “somebody might steal the ideas”. But as far as I’m concerned, a much bigger problem is that nobody cares about her ideas. We live in a world where researchers compete against all sources of information – and we must adapt to this game. In my experience, the ratio of effort put in conducting research and communicating it is totally twisted, as most researchers lack the basic skills for social media marketing and hardly do any content marketing at all.

This is not only harmful for their careers, but also to various stakeholder groups that miss the important insights of their research. And I’m not only talking about popularization, but also other researchers increasingly rely on social media and search engines for finding relevant papers in their field. Producing high-quality content is not enough, but you also need to market your papers on social media. By doing so, you are making a service to the community.

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