Today I want to talk a little bit about the idea of your academic brand vis a vis the concepts of engagement and self promotion.
Building your academic brand is a minefield because it requires you to carefully traverse the terrain of being an insufferable ****** on social media who everybody hates, and someone who genuinely shares things to engage and inform a relevant audience about your research or ideas.
Twitter I think is probably the most difficult platform to manage in this regard. First you should be on Twitter. But how you use Twitter should be consonant with building your professional brand. If you want to re-tweet cat videos, probably get a personal account for this.
Twitter can be a valuable information source for your own research and it can be a good place to share your research, especially if your followers are people in your field (or connected) who might actually read and engage with what you are tweeting.* However, it can seriously damage your mental health too, so it pays to think before you Tweet, and also, think before opening Twitter.
I tend to use a social media management platform (I use Hootsuite, but others are available) to manage Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc). I am not just randomly hanging about there, because it is not a good place to be hanging out.
I am mindful of my social media health and you should be too.
Engagement
When you use social media to engage, you are sharing valuable information that other scholars might find useful. This can be a direct self promotion - here is a link to an article I have published on X. You can @ particular scholars who might find it helpful. This is of course telling everyone you published (hoorah) but it also serves a community purpose. It shares useful information. This is a good use of Twitter. This is engagement. You have built a following (or follow specific people) who are relevant to your research and field and you have given them a heads up on something they might find useful. You are building a community and a brand. If you are a senior scholar (but not the head of school) you should absolutely promote the work of junior scholars you think is interesting and useful via referencing it and its content. Use your platform to pay it forward. Be a generous and kind mentor.
You can even Tweet about being at a conference if you have something to say about it, the panels and the papers. Share what you have heard, or presented. Thinly veiled ‘it was great to be here’ references are pretty pointless. It is like writing ‘I WAZ HERE’ inside the toilet stall. With your name attached.
Grandiose self promotion
If all you do on Twitter is promote your CV (I was here, here, here and here, and also here; I did this, look how important I am, LOOK AT ME) you are one of those people I have to mute. I’m pretty certain others are muting you too. Similarly if all you do all day long (it appears) is Tweet things (such as calling out stuff) also know I have you muted too. So when you do Tweet something useful (if you ever do) I will absolutely not be reading your work, because you were muted.
This head mashing, screaming into the void tells me a couple of things about you. I might not want to work near you, and I might think twice about hiring you, if you appear totally self absorbed in relation to your social media posting. You might not be giving out signals that appear very collegiate or community building orientated. So it is worth considering how you use social media to engage peers.
Be aware of the signals your Twitter feed is sending out about you and the kind of colleague (and scholar) you might be. Navigating the line between building your brand and sending out the kinds of tweets that annoys everyone because they are grandiose acts of self promotion (or worse, the humblebrag) is something you should pay serious attention to. This is not the same as building your brand.
*If you are looking for tips in managing algorithms on Twitter and getting more followers, please see @careerconversations who has really excellent technical advice.