Twitter has infiltrated into academia. To tweet or not to tweet is the question. Twitter does help in disseminating information, stay abreast with newer concepts and get answers to queries. Here are some tips to use twitter in a more beneficial way for research.
Tweeting is one of the fastest ways of sharing information online. It has taken the social media by a thunderstorm and professionals, celebrities, sports persons, academicians et al have been using it for their advantage.. It is a very powerful source that can be used for disseminating information. Twitter , as we know is a form of micro blogging. It gives you only 140 characters to put down the gist of what you want to express. Hence the term
"microblogging"
Raise queries: Bringing up queries on twitter gives almost instant feedbacks on topics. Putting up questions on twitter can be made more responsive and productive by putting specific keywords as hashtags ( #dissertation) Hashtags ensure your tweet to get seen and used further. Make it more interactive on twitter by acknowledging the responses that you get for your queries. It aids in networking and building better relationships.
The Tweet Deck: Tweetdeck as an application is very useful in a twitter like environment as it helps in a situation where there can be not hundred but thousands of followers and the information needs to be managed in a relevant way. Through this app it becomes easy to manage the people following. It also becomes possible to schedule tweets for all through the week.
Often researchers are found using witter inn a different way. Mostly researchers are seen using it to share information and updates about their research accomplishments or developments/ some are also using it for the purpose of knowing what other researchers are up to so that they can be updated with the market trends. Networking of course is a very obvious advantage of twitter.
Twitter is seen to have its own limitation, especially for new entrants with fewer followers. To increase your presence and become more popular link your twitter with your friends on other social networking tools such as LinkedIn and Facebook.
The word limitation that twitter has is also ab hindrance, particularly when more complicated issues have to be discussed.