Today the Social Computing group at Qatar Computing Research Institute had the pleasure to listen to the presentation of Luis Fernandez-Luque about social media marketing for researchers. Luis talked about how to promote your publications and personal brand, as well as how to reach the right people on social media with your research. In this presentation, I'll summarize some points of his presentation (if you want the full thing, you need to ask him :), and reflect them on my own experiences as a digital marketer.

1. SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
FOR RESEARCHERS
HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR PUBLICATIONS AND REACH THE RIGHT PEOPLE
Dr. Joni Salminen, based on the ideas of Dr. Luis Fernandez Luque
April 2017

2. 1. UPLOAD YOUR ARTICLES TO THE 3 BIG SOCIAL
MEDIA PLATFORMS FOR RESEARCHERS
• ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/home
• Mendely: https://www.mendeley.com/newsfeed/
• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/

3. 2. RECYCLE CONTENT AND IDEAS
Luis mentioned he was able to increase the popularity of one of his papers by
creating a Slideshare presentation about it. This principle is more commonly
known as content tree in inbound marketing. I completely agree with Luis' advice -
it is often straight-forward and fast to create a presentation based on your existing
paper, because you already know what you want to say.

4. 3. CREATE AN ONLINE COURSE
MOOCs and other forms of online education form a great way for disseminating
your ideas and making your research more well known. Luis mentioned two
platforms for this:
• Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/
• FutureLearn: https://www.futurelearn.com/

5. 4. CHOOSE THE RIGHT TITLE
The title plays an important role for two reasons:
1. it determines whether people become interested and click forward to reading
your paper, and
2. it can increase or decrease your chances of being found in Google.
So, how to choose the title of a research paper?
• Research & include relevant keywords
• Mention the problem your research deals with

6. 5. WRITE GUEST BLOGS
The rationale is the same as in the case of social media platforms: these venues
already have an audience. As long as the blog deals with your vertical, the
audience is likely to be interested in what you say. For content marketers, getting
quality content is also a consistent source of concern, so it is easy to see a win-win
here.

7. 6. DEFINE YOUR AUDIENCE
On social media you cannot control who sees your posts, but you can increase the
chances of reaching the right people by this simple recipe:
• Find out who are the important people in your field
• Follow them on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Tag them to posts of both platforms.
The last point doesn't always yield results, but I've also had some good
experiences by including the Twitter handle of a person I know is working on the
topic I'm writing about. Remember, you are not spamming but asking for their
opinion. That is perfectly fine.

8. 7. TRACK AND OPTIMIZE
How to measure social media impact?
• choose metrics
• set goals
• track & optimize
For example, you could have reads/downloads as the main KPI. Then, you could have the goal of
increasing that metric +30% in the next six months. Then, you would track the results and act
accordingly. The good thing about numbers and small successes is that you become addicted.
Well, this is mostly a good thing because in the end you also want to get some research done!
But as you see that your posts get some coverage, it encourages to carry on. And gradually you
are able to uplift your social media impact.