1. Social media: introduction to useful tools
for academics
Friday 28th November 2014
Tanya Williamson

2. Overview
1. About social media
2. Discussion: The potential benefits
3. Introduction to useful social media tools
4. Practical: Exploration of tools
5. Feedback to group
6. Discussion: The potential pitfalls
7. Engagement and impact

3. About social media
Social
media
Digital
services,
websites,
apps, cloud-based
Sharing
and
creating
content
Create
user
profiles
Networking and
communicating
Generates
usage data

4. What are the potential benefits?
• Connect and share with others
• Reduce isolation of solo researchers
• Keep up to date
• Improve traffic to your other web content
• Continue to use if/when you leave this Institution
• Break down hierarchies
• From broadcasting to engagement

5. Communication
(All social media are about communication!)
One which stands out is Twitter
• Follow interesting accounts
@lancasterunilib
• Keep up to date
• Search tweets and save
searches
• Aggregate tweets or take
part in ‘tweetchats’ using
hashtags #acrwri
• Make lists of accounts
• Share, converse, ask, link
to other web content

6. Video sharing
Has anyone heard of YouTube?!
• Subscribe to and create
channels
• Upload and share videos
• Very popular information
source for ANY topic
• Search for and share useful
videos
• Share your own knowledge
and comments

7. Profiles and networks
Aimed at academics and researchers:
Academia.edu ResearchGate Piirus
• Find others with similar interests
• Share outputs, expertise, posts, questions and answers
• Build social networks based on affiliation, discipline,
methodology
• Increase opportunity for collaboration
• Analytics

8. Presentation sharing
SlideShare
• Easily upload your
presentation to share with
others
• Search for other interesting
presentations
• Use alongside other social
media tools
Creating, storing and sharing presentations
Prezi, Emaze

9. Reading and referencing
Gather, store, share and cite your reading. Both require additional
download of software.
Mendeley Zotero

10. Data and code sharing
Figshare
• Easily upload your
datasets, figures, images
etc
• Each will be assigned a DOI
and will be easy to share
and cite
• Search for data (including
negative data) and figures
Github Collaborate and share code

11. Events
Eventbrite Lanyrd
• Find and create events in your area or on a topic
• Easily manage events
• Tie in with other social media tools
• Lanyrd enables sharing of presentations, profiles and follow up

12. Practical
Timing Activity
15 minutes • Choose a tool to explore
• Read the ‘About’ page or take a tour of the features
• Create a profile
• Explore!
• Try searching for people, your department,
association, or activity in an area of interest to
you.
• Was it easy to find something interesting?
• Did you find anything useful?
• How could YOU use this tool?
15 minutes Feedback to the group

13. Feedback
• Share with the group your first impressions of the social media
tool you explored
• Would you go back to explore it further?
• Can you anticipate any drawbacks?

14. What are the potential pitfalls?
• Privacy and the blurring of boundaries between personal and professional use
• The risk of jeopardising their career through injudicious use of social media
• Lack of credibility
• The quality of the content they posted
• Time pressures
• Social media use becoming an obligation
• Becoming a target of attack
• Too much self-promotion by others
• Possible plagiarism of their ideas
• Commercialisation of content and copyright issues
From Lupton, 'Feeling better connected' Social media us by academics' (2014)#
• Be aware of University advice:
http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/iss/security/training/social-networking/

15. Engagement and impact?
• Altmetrics: metrics based on the social web
• Track how many times a research paper (or any other digital
content with a DOI) receives ‘attention’
Altmetric ImpactStory