[ Date Index ] [ Thread Index ] [ <= Previous by date / thread ] [ Next by date / thread => ]
On Wed, Jul 10, 2019 at 06:58:50PM +0100, maceion@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > As one who has never used Twitter or seen any point in it, can you > explain why it is used in Academia? To be clear, it's possible that a lot of academics, perhaps even the majority, don't use any form of social media professionally. What I was intending to say was, if they use social media professionally, you can be almost certain that Twitter is one of the things they use. So, if you were looking for a social media platform to reach academics, Twitter would be it. For 1-to-1 corresponding with people I already know well, email is preferrable. So why bother with Twitter? Well, it's basic network effect / long tail stuff, isn't it? Twitter is useful to the extent that people use it, and the beauty of it is that it helps people with uncommon interests find each other, wherever in the world they live. The things I find it useful for are basically rapid discovery and promotion of: - new research (links to draft articles) - new tools (software) - job opportunities - key issues of good scientific practice One example, I made a short blog post in January about some poor scientific practice in my field. I posted a link to Twitter. Within a few days, 4000 people had visited that blog entry. In academia, that counts as a lot of attention :-) Similarly, I use Twitter to promote Free research software I write. One of my R packages recently passed 10,000 downloads. Again, for specialist niche research software, that's a big number :-) So, I guess I think of it as a global noticeboard that I use to keep in contact with the relatively small number of people worldwide who are interested in what I do. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq