The European Respiratory Society is dedicated to promoting knowledge and research in respiratory health. It is vital to us, to ensure that our authors’ work reaches a wide and diverse audience. For researchers and authors, social channels are an opportunity to boost the profile of their work by getting immediate feedback from their peers and discussing aspects of their scientific work that might not form part of their conventional published output. Journalists too increasingly make use of social channels, and creating a social buzz can be a route to mainstream media coverage. The social setting is much less formal than a journal or academic conference, allowing for a more friendly, conversational tone. The ERS itself promotes its publications through a range of social media, and will engage enthusiastically with authors’ own efforts.
This guide will concentrate on the three main ‘public-facing’ social media channels – Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, with diversions into Wikipedia, Google Scholar, Reddit, blogging and image/video sharing services. There is, however, an enormous range of online social networks out there, some of which are aimed specifically at researchers – Mendeley, ResearchGate and Academia.edu, for instance. Particular regions have their own social media networks, too. If your work is relevant in China, our social media guide, specific to this region will be of interest.
As this is a guide to social media and sharing, if you have comments or would like to add to it, please get in touch:
E-mail: journals@ersj.org.uk
Twitter: @ERSpublications
Facebook: EuropeanRespiratorySociety
General pointers
Social media is about conversation, but before you can start that conversation you have to engage people. Make sure your posts are concise and focus on what would be the most interesting aspect of your work for the audience you are trying to reach. If different portions of your desired audience are likely to be interested in different aspects of the work, there’s no harm in posting several different messages - just don’t overdo it. Remember, too, that these networks don’t exist in isolation: if you make a video abstract or write a blog post, you can embed it or share it across Twitter and Facebook, for instance.
Be prepared to engage! Posting on social media is effectively a call for comments and replies. You might get constructive comments, tough criticism, ill-informed nonsense or even spam, so be selective about what you reply to. But do reply to those you decide are worthwhile – you never know where a conversation might lead.
Don’t be disappointed if you don’t get a response, though: lots of social media posts don’t generate any comments. But that isn’t to say no-one is reading them or even sharing them.
If you’re interested in whether others are talking about your article on social media or in the press, you can search for it online or, for ERJ articles, you can use the ‘Article Usage’ service on the 'Info & Matrics' tab of your published article, also known as article-level metrics. This tracks a wide range of social networks and news sources, including most of those listed here.
Twitter is a huge network, with over 500 million Tweets being sent each day, hundreds of millions of people are exploring links, articles, Retweets, Trends and Moments to find out more about what's new. At its best, Twitter is a fast-moving, almost conversational, medium and the strict format can allow a surprising amount of personality to come across. Most journals, societies, institutions and publishers have a Twitter presence, and will often retweet posts about research they have published or sponsored if you mention them, particularly if your profile says clearly who you are. This is a good way to gain visibility on Twitter, and to build your own list of ‘followers’ who are then likely to see your future tweets. You can also bolster your Twitter reputation by following colleagues and prominent researchers, retweeting others’ interesting posts, tweeting about interesting papers you have read or ‘live-tweeting’ from academic conferences.
Tweets have a 280-character limit, but you can embed images or videos – if your article contains a figure that sums up the key finding, please include it! A hashtag - written with a # symbol - is used to index keywords or topics on Twitter. This function was created on Twitter, and allows people to easily follow topics they are interested in. When used correctly, hastags can be an effective way to grow the reach of your work. Consider using popular hashtags like #RespEd or commonly used words and phrases, for example, if your research is connected to asthma include #asthma and any other key words in your post to make it easily searchable. If your article is open-access, consider using the frequently-used #FOAMed (‘free open access medical education’) hash-tag.
If you’ve published in the ERJ, ERJ Open Research, Breathe or ERR, you have already written one tweet, which has been published alongside your article. That’s a good place to start.
Facebook has more than 1 billion active users per month. It is more personal and less news-driven than Twitter, but many scientific organisations and publishers maintain pages. Posts can be as long as you like and can (and should) include links, hashtags, images and video. You can choose whom you share your posts with by allocating your Facebook friends to ‘lists’. Before posting, make sure you have ‘liked’ the pages of the journal or publisher and your institution, and perhaps ‘friended’ your coauthors, and mention them in your post. That way they are more likely to see – and share – your post. People will then be able to comment on and re-share it.
LinkedIn (and Google Scholar profiles)
LinkedIn is more a career-focused network than a news-sharing one. This can make it useful for learning about new funding opportunities and connecting with old colleagues, potential employers and future collaborators.
Joining groups is an effective way to meet the people with whom you want to connect. Although groups do attract a degree of spam, they are a good place to start or join discussions on topics you are interested in. Groups can also be a good place to discuss clinical research that is likely to affect people’s day-to-day practice.
By adding your publications to your LinkedIn profile, and connecting to current and past co-workers, you can use LinkedIn as a way to meet potential new collaborators. You can also create a personal profile on Google Scholar, and link your publications to it. This allows anyone who finds one of your papers using the Google Scholar search engine to see a list of other relevant publications and citation information.
Video sharing
A video summary of your work can be an engaging way to introduce your findings and guide people to the full article. Depending on your expertise and confidence, your video could take the form of a direct-to-camera speech, a slide show with a voiceover, an animation or any other format you wish. A good place to look for inspiration is the BMJ, which makes use of ‘video abstracts’ for research articles – see http://www.bmj.com/multimedia/video/collections/video-abstracts.
A range of video-sharing sites are available, including YouTube and Vimeo, and once you have uploaded your film to one of these sites, you can share it further through most of the other social media mentioned in this guide. Should you wish to create a video abstract of an article you have published in an ERS publication, we will be happy to help you disseminate it, subject to the editors’ approval.
Blogging (and Medium)
Blogging is a somewhat different beast to most of the other social media discussed here. A blog post about your work might take the form of (for instance) an informal editorial putting it in context, a background piece on your reasons for carrying out your study, or a discussion of the process of carrying out the work. Blog posts should be engaging, thoughtful pieces that add something to the work you’re discussing.
As important as what you write is where you publish it. Maintaining your own blog, via Blogger or WordPress for instance, requires an ongoing commitment to writing regular posts and publicising what you’ve written. Alternative solutions include setting up or writing for a departmental or institutional blog, or finding an existing blog for your subject and asking to write a guest post. Several national and online newspapers offer blogging sections and may be interested to hear from you if your area of research is being discussed in the news.
Medium is a blog-esque site for writing on any topic. There is no commitment to frequent posting, or even to writing more than once, and the site is curated by editors. Medium will also publicise selected posts via its own social media accounts.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is one of the most successful ‘social’ sites there is, and as an information source it has extremely high visibility. Just think how many Google searches feature a Wikipedia link in the top two or three results. If your publications have advanced human knowledge, then making sure that Wikipedia reflects that advance is a good way to tell the world – and to make sure the credit is given correctly.
You can edit Wikipedia pages anonymously, but to create a new page you will need to set up your own account.
Reddit describes itself as ‘the front page of the internet’. It’s a somewhat anarchic, but extremely popular, service for sharing text, images and weblinks. Reddit is divided into multiple ‘subreddits’ covering almost every topic imaginable. Posts become more or less prominent based on votes from the community. Reddit is perhaps not the best place for serious scientific discussion, but there are subreddits devoted to respiratory therapy and nursing, for instance.
Pinterest (and Instagram, Flickr)
Photo-sharing services such as Pinterest, Instagram and Flickr can be useful if your research produces a high volume of interesting images. Flickr in particular allows you to make a range of download sizes and licensing arrangements available to others.
China
China is the world's largest social-media market and it is very different from its equivalent in the West. If your work is relevant in China, you may wish to look into setting up an account with the various Chinese social media platforms;
Sina Weibo or 'Weibo', is the Chinese word for "microblog". Weibo is the most popular social media platform in China and it can be best described as a hybrid of Twitter, Facebook and Reddit. Weibo allows users to create and post feeds and attach multi-media content. About 172 million people use the site daily, by comparison, Twitter, which is blocked in China, has around 100 million active daily users.
Youku is one of China's top online video and streaming service platforms and comparable to YouTube.
Zhihu is a Chinese question-and-answer website where questions are created, answered, edited and organised by the community of users. The best responses are upvoted by other users, similar to Quora. It features high-profile Chinese entrepreneurs and public intellectuals among its users. It is an online space for rich discussions on many topics.
Useful resources
http://socialnetworkingforscientists.wikispaces.com/
John Launer’s The Age of Twitter
http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/postgradmedj-2013-132400
The General Medical Council’s Doctors’ Use of Social Media
http://www.gmc-uk.org/guidance/ethical_guidance/21186.asp
The Royal College of General Practitioners’ Social Media Highway Code
http://www.rcgp.org.uk/social-media
The American College of Physicians and the Federation of State Medical Boards’ Online Medical Professionalism: Patient and Public Relationships
http://dx.doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-158-8-201304160-00100
Holly M. Bik et al.’s An Introduction to Social Media for Scientists
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001535
Other publishers have also produced social media guidelines for authors and editors. Oxford University Press and Nature are good examples.
Note of caution 1: Personal versus professional
Social media and mobile devices have blurred the boundaries between personal and professional life, and there are plenty of examples of people who have lost sight of the line entirely and got into serious trouble. This poses particular challenges for physicians and teachers, who are bound by strict standards of confidentiality and professional conduct.
In practice, this means being very aware that anyone could end up reading what you post, and of the privacy settings on your social media account. Some networks allow you to restrict visibility of particular posts, while others have blanket settings. Some allow you to create a ‘corporate’ page, perhaps for your lab or research group.
In ‘Useful resources’ above, we’ve collected some professional organisations’ guidelines on social media use – please do read these. Your own professional organisation may also be able to advise you.
Note of caution 2: Publishers’ copyright
Before reposting whole articles to social networks, please check your publisher’s copyright policy – there may be limitations on what you can do, and publishers prefer you to direct people to the ‘version of record’ on the publisher’s website. Where content is behind a pay-wall, they may even be willing to give you a time- or usage-limited ‘toll-free’ link to the published version of your article. ERS is trialling a single-page shareable PDF, which features the main article details and the abstract/extract. Unlike the full-text version, this PDF can be uploaded to commercial sites such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu; it contains a link to the full version on ERSjournals.com.
• The ERJ copyright rules can be found here.
• The ERR, ERJ Open Research, Breathe and the European Lung White Book are published under Creative Commons licences that allow you to share articles as you wish (for non-commercial purposes only), although we would prefer you to link to the free version on our website.
• If you have written content for a ERS Monograph or another ERS book, please get in touch.
Note of caution 3: Networks’ conditions of use
It’s generally worth checking the conditions of use of any social network. They generally allow the network and its users to make fairly wide-ranging use of your posts and any other content you upload. This is necessary to enable the social network to function (Twitter, for instance, adds some explanatory notes - https://twitter.com/tos), but do make sure you’re comfortable.
Footnote
This document does not represent legal advice. If you are unsure whether something is appropriate to post on social media, please consult your employer or professional body.
This page was last updated on 23 August 2018