Increasing Your Scholarly Visibility and Impact: Twitter

Twitter offers a means to amplify the impact of your work and that of others.  Here are some tips on how to do it.

Tweeting Tips

• Advocate for yourself.  Post on your own research, e.g. your ideas and publications.
• Advocate for others.  Retweet or post acknowledgments on the fine work of your colleagues.
• Post while at conferences.  Post on presentations at conferences you are attending, giving readers real time input into new discussions and ideas.  Don't forget to use hashtags.  See below.

Twitter, like a lot of new media, is bedlam.  A critical tool for communicating with others on a specific topic on Twitter, Instagram and similar outlets is through a hashtagged text—i.e. a hashtag followed by a word or phrase without spaces or punctuation.  (Examples include #law , #statutoryinterpretation or #trademarkdilution.)  Hashtags make your tweets searchable.  Anyone searching by the text will pull up tweets that contain the hashtagged search term, increasing the likelihood that those interested in that topic on Twitter will find your post.

Hashtag Tips

• Use no more than two to three hashtags.  You can use as many as you like but conventional wisdom suggests fewer is better.
• Hashtags are typically not a medium for humor or irony.
• Be careful with hashtags that have become "too popular."  Those associated with major events in politics, popular culture can become coopted by other conversations and lose their importance in searchability.
• If tweeting from a conference, use the official hashtag for that event.