Facebook can be a powerful social media tool for academics.
It can let you stay connected with colleagues as well as family and friends. You can tap into your scholarly network by sharing status updates on your work - your new publications, to share new information, or even network with your friends' friends.
Many academic and news / opinion journals as well as newspapers have Facebook accounts and post daily updates with links to articles. You can share news items of interest to your academic or scholarly network.
Search for Interest groups and use hashtags to find colleagues.
Use LinkedIn to connect with your colleagues and use it to widen your research impact.
Tips to improve your LinkedIn profile:
- make your profile public so that others can see your education, experience and publications
- be sure that your LinkedIn Headline describes your profile, is succinct, and illustrates your unique expertise
- add a photo
- use the summary section to describe your experience and how it has made a difference.
- include information about your awards and publications
Twitter - microblogging using 140 characters or less.... Twitter a social network that allows allows researchers exchange public messages (not ony text, but images, video, links to online content)
Your messages, called TWEETS, are seen by other Twitter users who follow you...this is your network.
You can quickly build your scholarly network, you can keep up in real time with your scholarly colleagues, use it to share references (and even PDFs),