This week I participated in the weekly #LTHEchat on Twitter that focused on academic use of social media and the extent to which it can form supporting evidence in promotion applications. Like everything the answer is it depends. Including the number of your followers doesn’t illustrate your impact or how you engage with them. However, demonstrating your contribution to a community, for example by leading a #LTHEchat or extracting an article’s altmetric data helps to establish your influence beyond your institution and potentially also internationally. Participants also outlined how they had used social media to support Advance HE fellowship applications using the statistics from twitter analytics (https://analytics.twitter.com).
My own Twitter feed is curated around higher education and it serves to both educate me and expand my network beyond my institution. I have benefitted from being able to have conversations with others I have never met and participate in communities of practice including the weekly #LTHEchat. David Walker and I were invited to host a Tweetchat a while back and it was a fast and furious hour where we both learned so much from the answers to the questions we posed.
If you would like to find out more about the Tweetchat I mentioned follow the link.
Susan Smith 