Why should academics be using social media? And which social media should they be using? There are so many tools and networks that could be of potential use to scholars that it can be difficult to keep track.
Times Higher Education has teamed up with Andy Miah, chair in science communication and future media at the University of Salford, to offer you the definitive guide to the social media tools available to academics, and how you can use them as you go about your scholarly work. There are many, many tools, but we have tried to give an idea of how higher education professionals might use them.
The A to Z of social media for academics
A IS FOR…
Academia.edu: Share your papers, track their impact, and follow colleagues.
Altmetric: Subscription-based tracker for your publications’ impact across different social media metrics.
Amazon Author Central: Create a profile page, add your authored books, link to social media, upload videos.
AnswerGarden: A neat little tool used for real-time audience participation.
AutoCollage: Free Microsoft tool for use in teaching. Uses face and object recognition to swiftly create a collage of several images.
B IS FOR…
Bitly: Save, search and organize all your links from around the web. Group them into bundles. Share them with friends.
Buffer: A tool to help you manage your social media postings, it auto-schedules posts; you just need to remember to keep it topped up.
C IS FOR…
CiteULike: A social bibliographic database for all your readings.
Coggle It: Collaborative mind-mapping tool.
CoverItLive: Engage remote audiences during events.
CreateSpace: Part of Amazon, helping you to self-publish all those books you've written.
Crowdbooster: Social media analytics tool to figure out what is going on.
D IS FOR…
Delicious: Revived social bookmarking site.
Devonthink: A useful way to store and manage your work and related media. Finds connections between content where you perhaps wouldn’t find them.
Digg: User-rated news delivery service, sharing what’s buzzing online.
Diigo: Research and collaborative research tool and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site.
Dlvr.it: A service that allows users to link their various social networking tools in order to reach a larger and disparate audience.
Doodle: A useful way of scheduling meetings or making group decisions.
Dropbox: For making sure the essentials are backed up, and sharing large files.
E IS FOR…
Emaze: If you are bored with PowerPoint and scared of Prezi, then try emaze. It’s pretty snazzy.
EndnoteWeb: The online bibliographic package for storing your reading lists.
Eventbrite: Socially friendly ticket management system for events.
Eventifier: Create archives of events.
EverNote: If you like taking notes at conferences and want to share them, or just have them accessible across devices, this works.
F IS FOR…
Facebook: Social networking with colleagues and for teaching groups. The biggest social network in the world.
FigShare: Allows researchers to publish all of their research outputs (presentations, figures, papers, data, etc) in seconds in an easily citable, sharable and discoverable manner.
Flickr: For curating and sharing image sets, finding resources and amazing royalty-free images.
FrontiersIn: The Frontiers Research Network is a science publishing platform with a social networking dimension.
G IS FOR…
Github: Powerful collaboration, code review and code management for open source and private projects
Glisser: Turbo boost your live presentations with this interactive social platform.
Google+: Community spaces from Google.
Google Drive: For collaborative writing.
Google Scholar: Recently providing additional services, such as Google Authors and citation tracking for you or people you rate.
**To be continued**