Building your Online Research Profile - Twitter

Twitter is the social media hub of choice for a vast array of academics. It’s a great place to share your latest work, ask questions of experts, communicate your research field to the general public and engage in the general discourse of your community. It can potentially be a hive of politically charged vitriol too, but we can hopefully avoid swimming in those circles more often than not.

This guide will take you through the basics of setting up a profile, and working through the basics of a ‘tweet’, your ‘timeline’, your ‘followers’, ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’. There is a decent amount of platform specific terminology (much of it general parlance for social media these days), but we’ll get through it together.

This is Part 4 in the ‘Building your Online Research Profile’, to find all posts in this series, click here

What you need to start with

• A photo
• A short (~160 characters) biography
• An email address or mobile phone number (for account verification)

Signing up for Twitter

Signing up for Twitter is a pretty easy and straight forward process.

1. Go to Twitter and select ‘Sign up’
2. Provide your name, phone number OR email, and your date of birth
3. You will receive a verification code via phone OR email (whichever you selected). Enter this and you’re good to go!

Picking a good username

After you sign in for the first time, you may notice you’ve been given a ‘handle’ (the username that begins with an @) automatically. This will probably be something along the lines of your first name and a bunch of numbers. You should change this immediately to something more user friendly.

1. Go to ‘Settings’ (designated by a small cog or gear icon)
2. Select ‘Account’
3. Select ‘Username’
4. Type in whatever you’d like, Twitter will suggest alternates that are available (no two people can have the same handle)
5. You can now link to your twitter profile with the web address ‘twitter.com/yourname’ (e.g. twitter.com/alegione)

Some tips for your handle:

• Don’t make it overly lengthy: tweets can only be 280 characters and you don’t want 20 characters being used up by your name if someone wants to mention you
• If you can get your name, or close to it, then it’s the best option as it’s easier for people to search
• Make it something that’s easy to say out loud or read on a slide
  • Avoid substituting letters for numbers if it will mean someone reading you name in print form won’t be able to simply interpret it (e.g. @5imon or @0liver)
• If you can only make the start of your handle similar to your name, do that at least, as it increases the odds of appearing dynamically as someone is typing in your name into the Twitter search bar (e.g. @AlistairTheDoctor versus @DoctorAlistair)

Setting up your profile page

Now that you’ve set up your account and username, it’s time to fill out your profile page. This is a relatively painless process. Just select the little avatar icon in the menu, then on the right hand side select ‘Edit profile’.

You can do the following:

1. Add your profile picture
2. Add a background picture (personalise this towards your interests, work or otherwise)
3. Change your name, for example you could add ‘PhD’ or an emoji to the end of your name
   • Warning: Emoji’s don’t display consistently across browsers/operating systems, don’t use an emoji as your entire username
4. Add a biography, including your research interests, and where in the world you work (using your institute’s handle is a good idea here).
5. Include a web link, ideally this will be to your institute profile page, or somewhere that contains your contact email.

Your timeline

Your ‘timeline’ is made up of the tweets that you see, or more specifically the tweets of people you follow and the tweets that they retweet. Therefore if you don’t like what you see you’ve only got yourself to blame!

Who should you ‘follow’?

Who to follow really depends on how you want to use the service. If you’re likely to be a daily user, then you shouldn’t only focus on following the big shots in your field, but include twitter users that overlap with things you find interesting: comedians, political commentators, journalists, and podcasters. For networking purposes or staying up to date with your field, identify researchers that you’re familiar with and follow them as a starting point. You should also follow your own institute’s twitter account, as well as those of any colleagues you have so that you can work in tandem to amplify each other’s research.

When someone follows you, check out their profile and see if they seem like a human being (rather than a ‘bot’), and if they seem like it follow them back. If you decide after a short while that they’re not adding value or interest to your timeline you can ‘mute’ or unfollow them.

How should you use it?

You can be a lurker (someone who only reads Twitter, rather than contributing), but to get the most out of the service you’re best to occasionally contribute! How you go about this is totally up to you. As a starting point, share things you find interesting, whether it’s papers or news articles in your field, adding a relevant comment or a thread (see below). You can also add comments or replies to tweets that colleagues or experts in your field write. This increases your visibility both to these experts as well as their followers, as everyone can see your reply. Finally, share your own work, struggles and success! Whether it’s a published paper, a recent grant, collaborations or travel to a conference.

Tweets, threads, hashtags, and mentions

Tweets and replies: A ‘tweet’ is the basic content you put out into the world. You will see the Tweets of the people you follow on your timeline (the main page you see when you log in), and likewise, everyone that follows you will see your tweets on their timelines. The maximum length of a tweet is 280 characters, so you need to be conservative with your words. You can add impact to your tweets by including videos or images, which are more eye catching when people are scrolling through their timelines compared to a text dominant tweet. A reply is simply writing a comment/response to someone’s tweet, this public and can be seen by anyone. Presuming they have notifications on, the author of the tweet you’re replying to will be alerted to your reply.

Some important extra bits about tweets

• You can’t edit a tweet, so double check your spelling before you hit send!
• Tagging people (including their @handle) uses characters, but alerts them to a tweet you want them to see. You can get around the character usage by including an image and tagging them in the image instead
• Tweets where the image is the primary focus should include ‘alternate text’ for the image for people that use screen readers to aid their use of computers.
• If you include a video, captions assist people with hearing difficulties participate in your content, as well as allowing people to view your video without sound on.

Threads: The 280 character limit doesn’t always work for long reads, particularly if you want to discuss a complex issue or tell an in depth tale. Maybe you want to describe the results of your most recent paper? This is where ‘threads’ come into play. Threads are linked tweets that form a story your reader can easily scroll through. To begin a thread, write your first tweet, and then either select the ‘+’ option next to the ‘tweet’ button, or if you think of something you want to add later you can reply to the original tweet yourself. I can help to inform people they need to click through the tweet to find the thread, by ending it with [thread] or adding a count to each tweet (e.g. 1/3).

Hashtags A hashtag is a way for people to find linked tweets around an event, organisation, or topic. For example, conferences will often have a hashtag (e.g. #MicroBio2020). The hashtag acts as a link to click, which will bring up other tweets that have also used this hashtag. They can be great for conferences as a way to meet people who are also on twitter, so be sure to include them if there’s an appropriate one available! An alternate is to use a hashtag for research across a faculty or research group, so if people click through it they can find tweets related to this group going back through time.

Mentions: Mentions are when you add a fellow twitter users handle (@username) to a tweet, or reply tweet. This alerts them to the tweet (if they have notifications on), and draws their attention to it. Helpful if you’re trying share some useful new papers with colleagues, or your organisation to some recent work. However if you keep @mentioning people in tweets just to get their attention, it’s a quick way to get blocked.

Retweets and Likes

Quote tweets and Retweets: Retweets are a method of sharing content. If you see something on your timeline you find interesting or entertaining, you can ‘retweet’ it so that it appears on your followers’ timeline just like your tweets would. The default option was recently changed from a direct retweet (the tweet is effectively shown as is on your followers’ timeline) to a ‘quote tweet’. This allows you to comment or add your own thoughts as a preface to the tweet of interest, rather than directly sharing it. A quote tweet is a good way to get your followers eyeballs on the information you’re trying to share and is a good way to amplify the content you’re sharing.

Likes: Likes are a way of showing some appreciation for an interesting or entertaining tweet from someone else, without automatically sharing or replying to the content. Think of it as the lazy way to replying ‘haha’ on something entertaining. Everything you Like is saved in a list, visible to everyone who looks at your profile, and can be a good way to easily create a bookmark for tweets you want to come back to such as a fun new GitHub tool, or a paper you want to read. Don’t use Likes as a way to amplify content, it does little to nothing on this front. If you want to share a colleagues good news or research, retweets or quote tweets are always the better way to go.

My basic rule of thumb, if you want to save something to read later, use Like, for everything else - Retweet.

Lists and bookmarks

Lists: A list is a collection of accounts you don’t strictly want to follow on your primary timeline, but would like to go back to when the time is suitable. For example you may not want to see the day to day tweets of a political correspondent, but come election time you would like to have a curated list of reliable twitter accounts. You can create a list for this purpose, and access it like you would your primary timeline only when you want to see that specific topic. Another approach would be to create a list of all your close colleagues so you could get an idea of what they’ve been tweeting over the last week or two, without having to scroll through your whole feed. Note that people are alerted when they’re added to a list, so don’t be weird.

Bookmarks Twitter introduced bookmarks as a way to replace the use of Likes as a bookmarking tool. The idea is sound, but requires multiple click throughs when using Twitter, so I am yet to have moved from the ‘one touch’ Like method of bookmarking. If you’re new to Twitter though I recommend getting used to using it!

Muting, Blocking, and Reporting

So not everything on the internet is good, and Twitter can get a bad reputation for terrible people. Generally speaking if you aren’t heavy into commenting and replying on other people’s posts, you’re unlikely to attract the attention of the trolls. But if you do, well there are a few tools in your arsenal that could help. Muting: Muting is the simplest, and perhaps best, way of minimising the amount of terrible on Twitter. You simply stop getting notifications and stop seeing the writings of an individual on your timeline or anywhere on the platform for that matter. That person can’t see that you’ve muted them, nor are they alerted to it. They can keep writing to you directly (or anywhere on Twitter for that matter) and you’ll never see it. If you’re dealing with a troll, consigning them to shouting into a void is potentially better than blocking.

Blocking: If you block someone, they won’t see your tweets, won’t be able to tag you in anything, and won’t even be able to see your account page without logging out. Likewise you won’t see their tweets or replies, but you have the option of showing them if you wish. Blocking is occasionally worn as a badge of honour by trolls, and may elicit further harassment on other platforms. This is why muting may be the better approach.

Reporting: If things get really problematic, you have the ability to ‘report’ accounts. This is for when someone is being abusive or threatening. I strongly encourage reporting and disengaging wherever possible, rather than feeding the trolls. You can report accounts even if they aren’t directing the abuse at you personally, and I would recommend reporting any accounts you see that are violating what we might consider ‘community standards’.

Wrapping up

So that’s Twitter. It’s, generally speaking, a wholly worthwhile platform to be on, and for researchers provides a range of options for use and benefit.