Maximizing Academic Twitter: Networking, Engagement, and Customization Tips (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: This video is about academic Twitter. I must confess I'm a huge fan of Twitter and I think Twitter can be hugely beneficial for networking and for getting information but it also depends a bit on how you use it and I'm gonna share my thoughts with you in this video. So the first point is follow people for academic reasons. While I also follow some accounts just for the giggles and for laughing at some of the memes and whatever and maybe in some cases also for the news, I really don't follow people for private reasons. I keep that separate and I think this is a very good way to go. So follow people for academic reasons, follow academic accounts and follow scientists. So I think when you first join I think it's completely normal and understandable that you just read along and you more passively absorb information and this is also fine but I think you will find that this is going to be a better use of your time. Eventually once you've been on the app for a while to also engage and so make sure when you do engage in something that you feel passionate about or that's something that you actually know about and don't spam people with your opinions and so here are some suggestions for how you can have a meaningful engagement on Twitter. So what I like about it is actually it's a very low threshold to get in touch with somebody. It's it's much lower than you think. A threshold than an email for example, at least for me. So if I'll give you an example when I like a paper and really enjoyed the science that was done there, I tweet about it. I say like this is a great paper, bye and then if the author is on Twitter I can tag them and this is often a very nice way to get in touch with people and people would sometimes tweet back or send a private message like oh I would be interested in finding out what you liked about the paper or is there any opportunity to get in touch with you. So that's a great way to get in touch with people. collaborate or whatever and so I think it is a very low threshold to just get in touch with people on a specific topic like say a paper that they have written and sometimes it's also as simple as just being happy for people like I got a paper accepted like or I had this grant funded like congratulations or I got this promotion well done. It's just a way to keep tabs of friends all over the world in a very easy way and it's just also keep tabs of what they've been accomplishing and to just show your appreciation. I like that part of Twitter a lot actually. Of course we use also Twitter to showcase our own work. We spread news about manuscripts that were accepted or things that are currently going on in the lab and that just increases your exposure and spreads the results to more people that maybe then are more likely to read it or the papers are read in other lab meetings and I think this is also very positive and it is also a good way to get in touch with people. So that's a great way to get feedback. Sometimes we've also gotten feedback on papers that were for example that I said I would write currently this paper and then some people contacted me on Twitter and they ended up being co-author. So that's rare but it can also happen and there's a very nice way to network I think. What I also do every week is I post the paper that we read in the journal club, our lab journal club and that is also a nice way to well tell everybody what we're currently thinking about, what we find interesting, what we read and this has also been routinely a way to get in touch with people when they're on Twitter and you can tag them the authors of these papers that we read and this is a nice way to get into conversation about their work. What you can also do is you can share your other social media or outreach activities. For example if you're on Instagram or if you make videos or whatever you can also put that information on Twitter and so spread it to more people. Now having said that of course you need to also be more aware of what you're reading and what you're reading. Be mindful of how you use Twitter and what effect it may have on you. I mean it may raise your level of anxiety because you constantly are bombarded in your timeline with other people's successes and promotions and papers published and grants funded and so you know if you constantly compare yourself to others and like the other is basically the entire world in your in your Twitter feed maybe that can be inducing anxiety so you need to be very careful how you use the app of course. Also if it's a constant distraction then maybe you should limit the use of the app to certain times of the day and of course if you find if it negatively affects you just quit right. I mean it there's no reason for you to be on Twitter as a mandatory thing to be successful as a scientist. Plenty of successful scientists are not on Twitter, have never opened it and can't deal with it at all. This is fine. If you find this is not for you limit it or quit it. However I also think that maybe if you are in that situation where you are worried about it or where you think it might negatively affect you maybe you haven't used all the opportunities to customize that feed that Twitter offers and I must admit I have as recently as like last week some about about some of these functions and some of these functions I learned about very late and so I think it's very important to know these functions and I'm going to go through through some of them so that maybe this will enhance your Twitter experience overall. This is basically about curating your Twitter feed. If you do nothing then you basically get the default from Twitter and for example if you follow somebody another scientist or an organization what you will also get is when they retweet something. But oftentimes what people retweet or what organizations retweet is not as interesting and just may clutter your timeline. So one of the things that you can do is when you go to the page of the person that you follow and you click on the three dots you can just switch off the retweets as one as one click and basically then you only see what that person actually wrote themselves rather than what they have just retweeted. And that is actually a very nice way to clean up your your timeline on Twitter your feed on Twitter. Another thing is when you find a tweet it's just not interesting to you or it bugs you or whatever then you can also click on the buttons of that tweet and say I'm not interested in that tweet. You may also have some additional options and that also will limit what kind of content that you see. Of course if and I must admit this has never really happened to me if somebody really attacks you or is unprofessional or something like this or there's some bots I think this is the one thing that happened to me that there were some bots that were just spouting some nonsense then it's just very easy to block an account and then you basically are never bothered by them again. And also if you find following some person is not a positive effect for you then you can easily unfollow it by just that one click you have unfollowed that account. And what you can also do is something that most people don't actually know you can mute certain phrases or words. So then they're filtered out from your feed. So if you don't want to hear about pandemic for example then you can just but you still want to follow some people because they mostly tweet about science-related stuff but occasionally they also would tweet something on a pandemic then for as just an example then you can put that word in in the customization feature of your Twitter feed. And all of the tweets that contain this word or phrase will be filtered out. You can also use the mute function for people. So if you have a certain account. So if you actually don't want to unfollow somebody but you just want to don't not see the tweets from this account anymore you can also mute an account. So that actually the mute function is a very elegant way to make sure that you only see the things that you actually want to see on your timeline. Something that I have only very recently learned is when you go to your Twitter home if you go to the top right you can see these three stars and if you click on these three stars the default is that Twitter will show you the top tweets so what basically Twitter thinks are the things that you're interested in. It's a more it's a curation function that Twitter offers. What I usually do is I click on that and I say show me the latest tweets then it's just the tweets in the order in which they were produced not in the order or in the form or curation what Twitter thinks might be interesting to me because it might be interesting but it also might not be right. But I think it's important to know some of these customization features because I really think they can enhance your Twitter experience. And so if you've had a negative experience with Twitter or you're not quite sure how to deal with it and I must admit at the beginning it can be completely overwhelming maybe after having watched this video maybe you find it worth a try to look at Twitter again and check it out. If you have any questions feel free to ask me in the comments below. If you have any questions check out the different customization options for curating your feed. Either way if you're a long time Twitter user or if you are new or you're just thinking about it I hope you can derive value from Twitter the way I have and I hope you have a very positive experience on Twitter. And with that thanks for watching see you in the next video. Have a great day and I'll see you in the next video.