Twitter is the medium du jour, and if you’re like many other early-career researchers, you’re all over it. Fantastic. But digital and social media is about much more, and there’s more to consider than the content that you and everyone else are tweeting and retweeting.
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Don’t forget that you need to nurture your online persona – the summation and entirety of every bit of online information about you or that involves you, both written and visual. Someone may well have already posted some of this. But you can still shape and guide a great deal of the accessible online information about you — and the image that this information creates — by actively managing the content over which you have some control.
This is especially true if you’re looking for a job. It’s safe to assume that potential employers will look you up online and so you need to have control over the information presented about you.
LinkedIn is still one of the most highly used sites for finding out about jobs through your virtual network – and occasionally getting one. You’ll need to make your profile look good — and you’ll need to find a way to stand out from the rest of the pack.
If you’re not seeking employment, though, social media is still a hugely powerful and useful tool. It can help you reach networks of like-minded scientists, build research collaborations and even make friends
Lots of your colleagues find particular sites to be key venues when they want to engage in collaborative discussion, peer-review papers, share negative results that might never otherwise be published, and even upload raw data sets
And through these sites, you can build a powerful virtual network that will yield opportunities, information and advice. Here’s to the click!