How to #AcademicTwitter

My Twitter advice for academics:

1. Open an account.
2. Use lists.
3. Support your colleagues.

1) Every academic should open a Twitter account.

Even if you’re never going to post a thing on Twitter, you should open a Twitter account with your name, your picture, and a link to your faculty profile, SSRN page, or list of publications. My friend and colleague Shelley Welton has a dormant account of this type: https://twitter.com/shelley_welton

Even a dormant account has two big benefits:

• People look for scholars on Twitter and they can find your work; if you have a LinkedIn profile, you should have a Twitter account.
• Your friends, school, and colleagues will want to show off your research and it’s a lot easier if you have an account. They can “tag” you in a Tweet by including your username and then anyone can click on that username and find more of your research. There’s an example below and you can see the actual tweet here: https://twitter.com/AriPeskoe/status/893098291017072640

If you want to do a little more with your account, you could post a Tweet when you release a new article or project, with a link to your new work. Again, there’s an example below and you can see the actual tweet here: https://twitter.com/oilgaslawprof/status/895466721141694465

2) If you want to actually learn from Twitter, you should use lists.

Twitter puts a shocking depth and breadth of expertise at your fingertips; I am deeply grateful for all I have learned from my #AcademicTwitter colleagues. Twitter is full of academics, journalists, and policy experts on every topic.

But if you want to actually learn from Twitter, please don’t just go to Twitter.com and start scrolling. You should use lists.

By default, Twitter shows you a mix of Tweets from people you have “followed” plus ads and Tweets from people that it thinks you would like. It shows you these Tweets in an often random-seeming order based on Twitter’s own algorithm. Twitter, of course, wants you to spend more time on its site and click on ads. That is not your goal—you probably just want to quickly see what’s going on in your field. 

To see what journalists, academics, and experts are tweeting, you want to add them to a list. You do this by going to their profile and then clicking on the three dots to the left of the follow button. (Picture below.) Create a list, make it private for now, and start adding people to it. 

Once you have a list created, you can find it by clicking “Lists” on the left side of your screen. (Picture below.) Your list will show you all the Tweets of everyone on your list, starting with the most recent.

Unlike Twitter.com’s default feed, everything on your list is in chronological order and there are no ads or random tweets inserted, so you can quickly scroll through all the recent Tweets of everyone you want to read.

I use several lists depending on how much time I am able to devote to learning from Twitter. I have a very short must-read list of accounts. For example, I include @LegalScholBlog because I don’t want to miss an important conference announcement in my field. Then I have a couple slightly longer lists for various occasions such as when I have more time to devote to Twitter.

So if you use Lists to see what people are saying, why should you “Follow” people? People have different approaches but, in my opinion, following is a more social phenomenon. When you follow someone, you show them your support. You should follow your colleagues, your institutions, and basically anyone you’d have a conversation with. When you follow each other, you can send each other direct messages. 

One mistake I see Twitter users make is following and then unfollowing people because they get bored of their Tweets or just decide to focus on a different area. Remember: following is a social phenomenon. When you follow someone, they may well follow you back. If you unfollow them a week later, they might take it personally. That may be silly, but it’s human nature.

That’s why you use a private list. Maybe you followed one of your respected and brilliant colleagues and added them to your private list for reading. Then you discovered that they won’t stop tweeting about their Crossfit workouts. No problem: drop them from your private list and the Crossfit tweets are gone. But you haven’t unfollowed them so they can still direct message you about a topic of mutual interest and you haven’t caused any offense.

Another mistake I see on Twitter is following just a few people. If you view following as a social phenomenon, you should follow colleagues and contacts that you’d like to support or would be willing to have a conversation with. Of course you don’t have time to keep up with every tweet from all of them. We all know that; that’s why you use lists.

3) Support your colleagues by advertising their work.

Twitter gives you a great opportunity to boost your colleagues and your institution. Academic work is judged by how often people read and cite it; you can promote your colleagues’ work by tweeting about it or simply by hitting the “Retweet” button when they tweet about their own work.

At SMU, our Law Review keeps a public list of our academic and institutional Twitter accounts, https://twitter.com/SMULawReview/lists/smu-law. Anytime that I have the chance, I can scroll through this list and support my colleagues by retweeting items that would interest my followers. Every institution should have one of these lists.

Throughout my career, I have received indispensable support from my deans (@LawDeanHolloway & @jmcollinsSMULaw) and many of my senior colleagues on Twitter who have promoted my work through tweets and retweets. I am so grateful and have tried to do the same for my colleagues. My junior colleagues often talk about how grateful they are for Twitter support from senior colleagues.

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Finally, let me say that this is just one opinion, offered for what it’s worth. There are infinite possible approaches to Twitter and if people think my suggestions are misguided, I’d be delighted to hear what I could improve.