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Building community online through promoting others’ scholarly work: A Twitter strategy

A lot of scholars who are new to Twitter ask me “can you give me a Twitter 101?” – I figured I should probably post my advice on my blog. As I’ve said before, the reason why I founded #ScholarSunday, co-founded #GetYourManuscriptOut, is that these hashtag-based community-building strategies DO work.

In a previous life, actually co-authored a book on building robust online communities (it’s an e-book) with Arieanna Schweber, so the principles I suggest here are similar to the ones we proposed in our joint work. My approach is to provide content (yes, I know, I hate that word too) that I believe will be useful to my Twitter followers. Here’s the strategy I follow:

When I wrote this Twitter thread I proceeded to do exactly what I suggested: I chose 10 blogs and pre-scheduled tweets that would promote their authors. This is the strategy I follow to avoid being on Twitter all day long. I am well aware that I appear as though I’m online all day. I am not, as my tweets below explain. I pre-schedule content then take time to reply to mentions and conversations.

There are plenty of sources for good academic blogs. I recently came across a listing.

As you can see, I use Buffer and HootSuite to preschedule content and then spend a limited amount of time responding. This enables me to do my academic work without being online all day. This is not something I have not written about. I have explained this strategy plenty of times, both on Twitter and here on my blog. Hopefully, by giving my Twitter thread a more permanent space here on my blog, people will be able to refer to it.

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Posted in academia.


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