Track engagement regularlyy and adapt to what’s working

Plan your posts.

All your hard work will be lost if you don’t consider the best time to share your message with your audience. Coinciding with a relevant date (like International Women’s Day for example) or harnessing interest in a recent news story is a good way to increase interest in your posts if you can make your research topic relevant. Also, posting when your target audience is likely to be online and receptive to information will increase engagement – take a look at Hubspot’s 2020 report on social media use for guidance.

To generate engagement you need to be consistent and organised in your posting too. Using an account that has an established following, posts that use appropriate hashtags to drive traffic and content that appears on a regular posting schedule will increase your chances of being seen.

If you want to do this yourself, you could use a social media management platform like Hootsuite that will allow you to schedule posts and automatically suggest relevant hashtags and the best time to post. Alternatively, think about involving your faculty’s or central marketing team to help (or at the very least reshare) to improve chances of your posts being seen by your desired audience.

Track your progress.

Finally, you’ll want to know that your efforts have been successful. Decide what engagement measures are meaningful to you: is it retweets and likes, or number of comments and direct follow ups, or post reach (number of people who have seen it)? (You can see more guidance here.)

Most social media platforms have an ‘insights’ page that tracks this information for you – check in with it regularly to see what posts are working and at what time. Then do more of what works! Using social media for research isn’t a static process and be prepared for some trial and error.

Key Takeaways

Using social media to promote your research can be a useful route to engagement with non-academic audiences. There are six steps to follow to do this successfully:

1

Define why your research is important to the world

4

Use visuals to enhance your message

2

Identify your target audience and how your research can help them

3

Distill your research into simple, clear messages

5

Decide when and where is the best time to post

6

Track engagement regularlyy and adapt to what’s working

Complexity to clarity.

We’re visual storytellers who help academics use pictures to engage audiences, drive impact and facilitate change.

To find out more about what we do, visit niftyfoxcreative.com or follow us on social media @niftyfoxcreativ