Road Trip through Academic Twitter: First Stop, Tweeting as an Institution
At our first pit stop, we take an in-depth look at some highly successful accounts: Katrina Falkenberg at @EES_Update, Beth Hannon at @TheBJPS, Johannes (Yogi) Jaeger (@yoginho), who ran @KLI_Austria until June 1st, 2017, and Christopher Eliot at @PTPBio.
tl;dr My Five Main Takeaways:
Make the institute handle a go-to hub for specific types of content. (Re)tweet wisely but widely. Less noise, more signal. #academictwitter
Co-construct an Academic Twitter ecosystem. Collaborate by (re)tweeting and tagging posts from other #philsci accounts. #academictwitter
Create a living portrait of your institutional activities. Donât just post a photo+talk title. Inject a human perspective #academictwitter
Actively control how your event is tweeted. Set up ground rules, a hashtag, and create âsound-biteâ quotes for retweets #academictwitter
Twitter is great for networking, not that great for debates. Take the discussion outside after initial contact #academictwitter
1. Â Â Designate âconference correspondentsâ to live tweet from the ground. The rest can live vicariously through them #academictwitter #ideas
We will cover conference tweeting in our next post.
2. Â Â Rotate your handle between institute members. Showcase their work and perspectives. Â #academictwitter #ideas
3. Â Â Run âjournal clubsâ around your events. Summarize what youâre reading. Explain why. #academictwitter #ideas #teachingmoment
4. Â Â Use tools such as Tweetdeck and Buffer to manage what you see and how you tweet. #academictwitter #tips #makeitworkforyou
5. Â Â Check out #ScholarSunday each Sunday for scholars to follow. Contribute your own. #academictwitter #philsci #histsci
@EES_Update is the official handle of the brand new Extended Evolutionary Synthesis grant project (http://extendedevolutionarysynthesis.com/), an impressive consortium of 51 researchers across 22 projects, including philosophy of biology. They (very smartly) hired Katrina as the dedicated communications officer to run one of the mightiest interdisciplinary institute handles Iâve seen. I had to ask how she does it!
@BJPS, the official handle of The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science (https://academic.oup.com/bjps/) caught my attention with their highly successful conference campaign at ISHPSSB 2017. They just finished another conference campaign from EPSA. It was intriguing to see a journal account reach out beyond their published content to engage broadly with its disciplines. Now I want to know: who, what, when, where, how?
I am a fan of the frequent and engaging talk summaries that used to come from the KLI Klosterneuburg (http://kli.ac.at) @KLIAustria. They were orchestrated and composed by Yogi, the director of the KLI at the time. I am thrilled that he generously shared his Twitter wisdom. Parts of my interview with him will also show up in future posts (about conference tweeting and tweeting as an individual).
I asked Chris to share the guiding principles behind the official handle of Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology @PTPBio, a newly relaunched journal that is unique and remarkable as the first free, open-access, and researcher-run journal in the field.
Today we reveal the human behind the handles! Whoâs lurking behind EES_update and BJPS? A dedicated officer? A bot? A poor, tired grad student?
Katrina (EES): EES_Update is the communication platform for the extended evolutionary synthesis research program. It consists of a website, blog, twitter account and facebook page. These outlets work together to promote our research and that of others, as well as advertise related conferences, job vacancies and other pertinent social media accounts. Importantly, we use our twitter and facebook activities to direct people to our blog and website where the real âmeatâ is hosted. As the communications and outreach officer for the research program I am the one doing all the posting and uploading but I work very closely with the programâs 51 researchers across a wide variety of inter-related topics.
Beth (BJPS): The twitter account is 100% organic, free range, and bot-free! Itâs usually run by Steven French (Co-Chief Editor) and Beth Hannon (Assistant Editor); the Facebook account is run by Beth Hannon. Weâve been experimenting with giving the twitter account over to other academics at conferences we canât make ourselves, so that they can live tweet the talks in our place. Recently, weâve had Charles Pence tweeting from the ISH conference in Rio. He did such an excellent job, weâll definitely be repeating the experiment!
KLI: The @KLIAustria account was organized and run by Yogi Jaeger up until June 1st this year. Two examples of Yogiâs work: KLI colloquium with James DiFrisco & KLI colloquium with Jannie Hofmeyr
Chris (PTPBio): Since our relaunch as Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology earlier this year, I've been running the new Twitter account that came online with it, @PTPBio.
What content do you (re)tweet for your institution? Most importantly, WHY tweet at all?
Katrina (EES): Our goal is for EES Update to be a âhubâ for science communication in evolutionary biology, reaching a large audience with varied types of information across diverse topic areas. We hope that this might expose researchers in one field to current research in another to stimulate new ideas and research avenues. This simply wouldnât be feasible for an individual researcher to maintain alongside their traditional academic responsibilities.
@EES_update follows hundreds of twitter handles including empirical and theoretical biologists, anthropologists, philosophers and historians of biology, societies and journals. I look through the twitter feed regularly but as itâs too vast to read everything, I created a couple of lists to make sure I donât miss anything from our researchers or other researchers who frequently tweet about topics relevant to our audience. I also look at key hashtags and have a handful of google alerts but I find that reading the general and customized feeds are the most useful.
Beth (BJPS): I think one of the motivations behind taking to social media was that weâre a tricky journal for publishers to market. Itâs not just philosophers of science that engage with our content, but scientists too. That said, itâs not always easy to make our material obvious to scientists through conventional means. And there are plenty of philosophers beyond the sub-discipline of philosophy of science who might not have realised that our articles are relevant to their work, too. But social media respects no disciplinary boundaries! So itâs a great way of trying to ensure that our authors get read by all the people who might be interested in their work, not just the usual suspects. And while our first priority is to our own authors, it does the broader philsci community no harm to be given greater exposure.
Of course, tweeting about the Journalâs content is only a fraction of what we do. But I donât think we see ourselves as curators of everything phisci! We just tweet and re-tweet the things that we find interesting or funny, and think others will too (though YMMV!). Because Stevenâs interests run towards physics and my own towards biology, we hopefully cover a wide enough range of philsci topics. We try to give particular attention to early career and otherwise less visible people and their work (as we also do via the spotlight series on our blog, Auxiliary Hypotheses). What we donât re-tweet are advertisements for postgrad courses and similar.
Yogi: My experience with Twitter has been very good and very valuable, both running my personal Twitter feed and that of the KLI over the past two years. The KLI feed increased from about a dozen to several hundred followers over just a few months. It's a great way of presenting yourself or your institute to a wide but interested audience and to keep up-to-date with relevant literature and news beyond the boundaries your own field. It is absolutely essential nowadays for academic institutes to have a well-designed and informative social media presence. Twitter remains the platform preferred by most scientists. Tweets are much more effective for reaching your audience than websites, which people usually only visit when they want to apply for a fellowship/job, find information on a researcher at the institute, or get some other specific piece of information. Moreover, tweets give a more dynamic picture of the academic life and activities at an institute, and allow alumni to remain connected and updated without much effort on their side.
Chris (PTPBio): We mostly tweet content that's closely related to what we do. My assumption is that people choosing to follow us mostly want to hear about our content. That includes announcing our papers as soon as they're published and highlighting developments at the journal. When we retweet, it's usually still content related to the journal in some way. We pass on tweets and blog posts about our articles. And, for example, because a distinguishing feature of our journal is that it's fully open access, we recently shared a study showing that open access articles are cited significantly more often than paywalled articles are. So, our Twitter engagement is focused on supporting our product.
Has Tweeting been beneficial for your handle? What good does it bring?
Beth (BJPS): Thereâs a definite correlation between a paperâs downloads and citations on the one hand, and its promotion via social media on the other. Undoubtedly, this has to do with reaching those non-traditional audiences. And with the growth of AltMetrics, this is only going to become more important. On the whole, weâve found social media to be a fantastic means to bring attention to philosophy of any sort. I also run a public philosophy organisation (The Forum, based in the LSE), and using only social media our audience numbers have increased from something in the dozens to the hundreds. Social media both uncovers and cultivates a real appetite for philosophy.
People have mentioned that they found out about a particular conference, new research, or recently published paper (one of ours or some other journalâs) via our social media channels, which is nice. And so far, the feedback weâve received has been positive! For ourselves, I think we enjoy the chance to âchatâ, even a little, with our colleagues and friends who we might otherwise only see at the occasional conference, or whom we may never otherwise have come across.
Chris (PTPBio): Making sure the articles we publish are discoverable â that readers interested in their topics will find them â is one of our highest priorities. And I think Twitter is one of the best ways to release information about our articles into the wild. In that environment, it finds its way to interested readers we would never know to reach out to directly. When a biologist shares a tweet about one of our articles with coworkers, for instance, the article reaches a new audience. And in our analytics, we can see those visits to the articles on our site coming in from Twitter.
Now to the how-to part. How does one set up a Twitter environment for an event?
I asked Katrina to walk us through what she did for the first EES workshop:
Katrina (EES): In May this year, we held our first EES event, a small workshop at the KLI, entitled, âCause and Process in Evolutionâ. We used the acronym of the conference name plus the year for the hashtag: #CAPIE2017. Our rationale was that it was short so more characters could be used for the tweet itself and could be derived from the conference name if people forgot it. Live tweeting from participants was encouraged but images of slides with sensitive content were to receive permission from the presenter before posting. Itâs very important that conference tweeting respects the sensitivity of unpublished findings so it doesnât discourage the sharing of works in progress. As the person behind the @EES_update handle, I tweeted during all the talks and reciprocally retweeted other participants to maximize the content and reach of the tweets going out.
What is a good tweet? A good tweeting strategy? Dos and Donâts?
Yogi: There are a number of researchers who I follow that are excellent at picking out and posting interesting new work. Useful tweets briefly summarize topic and impact of a piece of work, and then link to it (and to potential secondary articles in science news media). A good tweet also includes handles of authors or other colleagues who are directly involved or affected by a paper. This gets the relevant people notified and often starts a discussion, especially if the results presented are controversial. I have had very good discussions, e.g. about the use and misuse of the "genetic program" metaphor (see below) that started with tweets on specific papers. Twitter, with its 140 character limit, does pose severe constraints on what you can explain. Sometimes, discussions need to move to email, Skype, or live conversations to provide appropriate context. Sometimes, there is value in brevity though, since it forces discussion participants to concisely state their most relevant points and arguments.
That being saidâŚless noise, more signal, please! Anti-examples are institutes that only tweet seminar announcements (usually available through websites or mailing lists anyway). Using hashtags effectively is extremely important to increase the abysmal signal-to-noise ratio that keeps many people away from Twitter. There is an awful lot of meaninglessness out there, like the alien in Kurt Vonnegut's "Sirens of Titan" that only broadcasts "I am here, I am here, I am here..."
Katrina (EES): We make a point to balance our highly field-specific tweets with more general tweets. For example, on the specific side, we tweet about recently published papers which advance a particular field. On the other hand, we try to reach a wide interdisciplinary audience by, for example, tweeting about our recent blog posts and those of others, which are accessible to a non-specialist audience. It is extremely helpful, especially at the beginning, to interact with other people or institutions with similar goals. You can retweet each otherâs content and together reach a wider audience. We are always looking to collaborate â the more comprehensive our content, the better.
Beth (BJPS): We donât have much in the way of a strategyâmostly what we do has emerged in the doing of it. Weâve certainly never sat down to discuss what weâre doing. We do try to tweet at different times of the dayâdespite our parochial name, our authors and readers span the globe! Twitter is so ephemeral, a tweet disappears into the void within a few hours and weâd completely miss those in other time zones if we didnât tweet across the day.
In terms of dos and donâts... Donât be a jerk? Remember that nothing good comes from arguing on twitter? Do engage only as much as you want or can, given the many other tasks on your plate. Do be yourself (except where that conflicts with being a jerkâŚ.). Donât fight it: embrace the videos of cats and dogs.
Chris (PTPBio): If I can find a way to display in just a few words what's exciting about a new article, that tweet will find its way beyond our core audience to other people it will excite. Philosophy doesn't lend itself to the brevity Twitter forces on us. But it can be healthy for the message to be forced to try!
Some accounts share a wide variety of content. They serve as portals to lots of interesting, vaguely-related stuff. There are virtues to that. It's sociable. It's inclusive. But as a reader, I mostly prefer to subscribe to accounts that have a high signal-to-noise ratio relative to my interests. I happen to like the more peripheral content @TheBJPS and @hoposjournal tweet, for example. But there are a lot of academics on Twitter I don't follow anymore because their academic topic is maybe 20% of what they tweet. I would love to hear about it, but I don't happen to care enough about their other interests to spend so much time scrolling. Reading Twitter uses up time and attention. So, I try to keep our journal account pretty focused and hope that some readers value that and don't miss the other stuff.
Who would you recommend following?
Beth (BJPS): In the years weâve been using twitter, the increase in twitter accounts for bigger projects has been noticeable. Some very active and informative accounts include @EES_update, @p_realism (run by our ex-Co-Chief Editor Michela Massimi), and @EpistInnocence. There are other non-bot journal accounts popping up too; @hoposjournal is particular active and interesting. And bot accounts arenât all bad! @PhilSciArchive and @SocPhilSciPract are particularly good for keeping track of new papers, conferences, jobs, and so on. Besides these group accounts, there are lots of individual philosophers and scientists that give great twitter; thereâs probably too many to mention and weâd end up leaving someone important out anyway!
Katrina (EES): The EES research program is by nature interdisciplinary and our twitter followers and followed handles reflect this. We highly recommend following a range of individuals, institutions/consortia and journals for a range of content and perspectives.
Yogi: I am reluctant to provide specific tags here, since who you want to follow will depend a lot on what kind of information you are interested in. There is no way around exploring and then selecting those feeds that are useful to you! I tend to follow A LOT of feeds, and then aggregate those I really like and use regularly into an "essential" (private) Twitter list. I've also created several other topical lists. Many tools also allow you to create dynamic lists that follow hashtags. I used TweetDeck on my laptop to do this. It is a powerful tool to manage and display feeds sorted by such lists and hashtags (although it does suffer from some annoying bugs and missing features, unfortunately).
Chris (PTPBio): There's not a right way to use Twitter. I read about people making Twitter friends (âtweepsâ) who become valued real-world friends, for example. Others enjoy seeing a wide-ranging snapshot of everything that's going on right now. But I spot new Twitter users who follow a dozen news outlets and a dozen major non-profits that each tweet several times an hour plus a handful of celebrities and politicians, and I can't imagine wanting that. Unlike all that, there is content on Twitter you can't get elsewhere. As a philosopher of science, being able to hear what papers and ideas biologists all over the world are most excited about discussing with each other has irreplaceable value for me. I can't hang out at the coffee machines in all the science departments. But I can see what they're eagerly sharing and discussing. So I look for accounts like that, in my specific areas of interest.
--Lynn Chiu, University of Bordeaux/CNRS