Last week, we heard from our Social Science correspondent, Bernie Divall, about how she has warmed up to Twitter but still has reservations. Here, I share some of my advice.
As a new academic, how do you find your community on Twitter? Hashtags can help you to do this. They sometimes have a broad audience of listeners, or an active participation level, or are associated with a particular event. There are a variety of ways of describing the same thing, perhaps across cultures or languages, so you have to think about which ones to use, rather like keywords in a search, or in your journal article abstract! You can read more about hashtags on Wikipedia, of course.
So, if you’re tweeting about your experiences as a new academic then you might like to gain attention by including on one of the hashtags listed below. And if you’re just watching Twitter to see what other new academics are experiencing or advising, then you might like to take a look at some of these:
- #ecrchat – often an event, with discussion. “chat” generally means that timed Twitter chats are held with that hashtag.
- #newfaculty
- #postdocs / #postdoc
- #gradchat
- #adjunctchat
- #phdchat
- #phdforum
- #phdadvice
- #phdproblems
- #esrcphd
- #gradstudent
- #postgrad /#postgrads
- #lovepg
Piirus likes to help you to grow your contacts so we hope to bring you more hashtag lists like this in the future, around other themes. For more tips, you can read some of our earlier posts relating to Twitter, too. Don’t forget that you can add your Twitter handle to your Piirus profile, and look for Twitter handles on others’ Piirus profiles, to help you learn more about and engage with the potential collaborators that you find through Piirus.
Which hashtags do you recommend using or watching, on Twitter? What themes matter to you and your work?
Thanks for this. This is really helpful, I must admit that I’ve mostly used #phdchat in most of my tweets, as I find it’s broad enough and active enough to always find some new update. I’ll be sure to check out some of the other ones you have listed
There seem to be different communities with slightly different emphases, and I like to watch a variety of hashtags at a glance, through my Hootsuite dashboard. It takes time to set up tabs of “streams” of searches or hashtags that you want to watch, but I find that it pays off. More on Twitter hashtags I like on this blog soon!
Thanks for this. This is really helpful, I must admit that I’ve mostly used #phdchat in most of my tweets, as I find it’s broad enough and active enough to always find some new update. I’ll be sure to check out some of the other ones you have listed
There seem to be different communities with slightly different emphases, and I like to watch a variety of hashtags at a glance, through my Hootsuite dashboard. It takes time to set up tabs of “streams” of searches or hashtags that you want to watch, but I find that it pays off. More on Twitter hashtags I like on this blog soon!