By Nadine Mirza

Forbes, Science and Nature have sung the praises of science on Twitter for years, and it’s never been easier to enhance your career with the bird app. Twitter gets a bad rep for the controversies on its platform, the most hilarious being a recent dispute instigated by the editor of a prestigious journal over a worm (C.elegans dispute). But I cannot overstate its value, especially for early career researchers. And so, as with Instagram a while back, I’ve summarised how to harness Twitter for your career progression.

1) Connections

Twitter makes individuals, communities, and institutions accessible to you, with none of the walls in place with other social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn.  Moreover, it is standard for organisations such as universities, societies, and funding bodies to have a Twitter account.

This means its relatively easy to connect with thousands of users relevant to your preferred fields. I choose to follow psychologists, academics, science communicators and science writers. And the people they follow and the people that follow them. Therefore, my Twitter timeline is full of up-to-date knowledge, literature, and resources on their particular fields. This approach means restricting which fields you want to hear from, while allowing for diverse opinions within those fields, effectively escaping the echo chamber. It also exposes peoples’ blunt opinions and has made me realise not just who I want to follow but also who I don’t.

Following also means being followed back, so make sure your profile conveys what you contribute: your field, institution, humanising aspects, and a website expanding on who you are. This can be a personal blog, an institutional profile, or even a ResearchGate account.

2) Opportunities

Being connected to people means getting a first-hand view of the opportunities they put out. Jobs adverts are par for the course on Twitter. Every day I see posts for a research assistant, a PhD student, an editorial role, a teaching position, or a post-doc. In fact, I got my first assistant psychologist role because of a retweeted post.

And then there’s everything else on offer – awards and competition announcements, trainings and courses, calls for volunteering or participation, requests to deliver talks. Thanks to Twitter I found out about the Max Perutz Science Writing Award, was able to participate in the University of Manchester’s Community Festival, became aware of science writing training offered by the Royal Society, and gained an interview spot for a fundraising event for Alzheimer’s Research UK. There has been so many career bolstering opportunities that I could trace back to a tweet.

3) Science Communication

Twitter has helped propel science communication into the digital age. Rotation curation (RoCur) accounts, which are themed and taken over by a new user after a certain period of time, are used to disseminate science and experiences. You get the benefit of hearing multiple viewpoints within a niche area, have the ability to run such accounts to provide your own insight to their pre-built audience, and it also leads to following likeminded individuals. I’ve personally enjoyed reading and running Minorities in STEM (@MinoritySTEM) and I Am Sci Comm (@iamscicomm).

Online events where science is shared through threads, images, animations, articles, and 2-minute videos have also gained popularity. Showcases like the Global Science Show and Pint of Science have taken this on and are supported by dozens of communicators at a time. Of course, you don’t need an event. People have independently tweeted about topics as serious as the efficacy of different types of masks during the COVID pandemic and as light-hearted as Pokémon and the real animals they’re based on.

By communicating science through Twitter you also become practised in explaining ideas and concepts in clear, minimal words. When restricted to that 140-character limit you grasp what’s easy and what’s necessary, with threads long enough to inform, but short enough to keep one’s attention.

4) Promote

Promote those opportunities you nabbed and the activities you did. Make use of the renown hashtags #AcademicChatter, #OpenAcademics, #OpenScience, #phdlife, #phdchat, #ECRlife, #ECRchat, and #scicomm, as well as field specific ones like #MedicTwitter, #BioTwitter, #PsychologyTwitter.

When promoting work you did with others (e.g. an individual or organisation) don’t be afraid to tag them. If you publish a paper tweet about it with a catchy blurb and tag the journal, the university, and the funder. Chances are they’ll retweet it, expanding your viewers to include their followers. In fact, sharing papers on Twitter increases not only readership but citations too.

Also use Twitter to promote your research as it’s happening. I promoted a research event on Twitter and tagged NHS Clinical Commissioning Groups. My event went from 10 to 50 attendees within 6 hours of posting.  Now, while COVID has dampened all my recruitment initiatives, I can still recruit via Twitter and have that amplified by tagging relevant individuals and organisations.

5) Networking

While networking in person can be intimidating Twitter makes it effortless. There are initiatives that allow for connecting with others easily like #FollowFriday and #MingleMonday threads, encouraging you to comment about yourself, share your research, and connect with likeminded individuals, both in and out of academia. These connections can even lead to collaborations; a professor was interested in my tweets on my work and asked me to collaborate on a project.

Conferences have also tuned into Twitter with their own hashtags, which people use to notify conference goers about their talks and create online discussion spaces. This is more prevalent in the current pandemic, with posters and talks being displayed online and questions in the comments.

6) Community

It’s cathartic to sit with your lab or cohort and share grievances. Twitter is this on a grander scale. Any question or concern you have has probably already been stated, and corroborated by others with shared experiences and advice.  Accounts like @AcademicChatter, @OpenAcademics and @PhDVoice even let you share anonymously. Confrontations with supervisors, software dilemmas, #ImposterSyndrome, career trajectories, it’s all being discussed.

And it cycles back to your first follows. Your initial contacts lead to opportunities, which gives you content to promote, which allows a basis for networking, which embeds you in the Twitter science and academic community. Which gives you more contacts, which gives you more opportunities, so on and so forth. All strengthening your place in that community. You become aware of the discourse and with time it becomes easier to participate. Whether it’s on serious debates such as work life balance or how many papers one should publish, or casual fun like #AcademicsWithCats and memes about dreaded #Reviewer2, this community eases the scientific and academic journey by reminding you you’re not alone.

Useful accounts to follow and tag:

@FBMH_DocAcad

@OfficialUoM

@UoMOpenAccess

@UoMEngage

@FBMH_SR

And if you need a follower:

@thealmostpsych