Thing 5 - Social Media for Researchers / Article "The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? - Melissa Terras"

 I chose to read "The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? - Melissa Terras" mainly because intuitively I felt the answer was YES of course it is!" and after reading this post it confirmed my thoughts. Altmetrics is a buzzword when it comes to blogging / tweeting or using any social media platform to help the researcher understand the popularity of their work through the number of 'likes', 'shares', 'tweets/re-tweets', and such indicators of reading and sharing or using the information.

The author chose to study what the impact of  blogging about each of the articles written and tweeted followers with links to the original article. Traditional academic researchers may on the contrary find this a time-consuming excersise, in addition with the lack of technological know-how support. This is perhaps an opportunity for Research advisors/Librarians / Liaision Librarians / who may be  on-board and offer such training to kick-start the traditional academics on this journey. It may be an idea for having 'researcher-hubs' in institutions for cross-disciplinary researchers to get together and share how they have been dealing with traditional versus alternative engaging methods of disseminating their research.

A couple of points of interest in this article to consider were:

• Upon blogging and tweeting, within 24 hours, there were, on average, 70 downloads of my papers. 
• As an example of  the author's blog posts, there were  2000 visits per month, 70% new with an average time on the site of 1 minute and 5 seconds
• It's all about the timing - Don’t tweet things at midnight; don’t tweet important things on a Friday, especially not late; The best time is between 11am and 5pm GMT, Monday to Thursday in a working week.