The challenge of recruiting new scholarly tweeters

I have blogged about this topic several times: How do you get other scholars onboard Twitter? Unless they are already there, they can be difficult to convince of the benefits of Twitter. Time constraints; horror stories of misinformation, fake profiles and a channel for spreading evil rumours; and assumptions that Twitter is the essence of annoying Facebook status updates keep popping up as reasons not to join Twitter.
And I’m not alone in experiencing this phenomena. Eva Alisic, a fellow scholarly tweeter, is also struggling with getting her colleagues to join in on Twitter discussions. Inspired by the #hcsmanz chats and #phdchat she has set up a Twitter Journal club on Mental Health Research (#traumaresearch). The challenge is however to get people on board Twitter. In order to make it easy for new Twitters to join, she has made this short video “Twitter for Academics: Instruction video”. It’s tailored to mental health researchers but contains general information as well.
It covers how to:
1. Create a Twitter account
2. Fill out your profile and send your first tweet
3. Find trauma & PTSD experts to follow
4. Use hashtags, with examples specific for research and mental health
5. Join the #traumaresearch journal club via Twitter or Tweet chat
The video is very simple and a good starting point for to-be Twitters, who are ready to face their prejudice of being bombarded with useless information about their friends everyday life, fake profiles and tons of rumours and non-trustworthy information. I hope Eva’s first #traumaresearch journal club, which took place on Friday 23. February went well and that her video has helped and will continue to help new tweeters to join the rest of us 🙂