Do you want to be a successful academic and achieve an impact with your research? Learn why you need to share your research on LinkedIn! Don’t miss out and follow the LinkedIn for researchers series by Motivated Academic!
Have you got your research proposal accepted and funding for the PhD project in place? If not, make sure you check out our guidance on:
– how to contact a potential PhD supervisor
– how to contact a potential PhD supervisor
– how to prepare a successful research proposal
If you’re already working on your PhD full steam ahead, you must have realised by now that dissemination of your research is crucial to building your academic profile. This is because you want to be known as an expert, a go-to person in your research area. To achieve this, you need to make your work easily accessible to other researchers.
How do you build your academic profile and expert brand then? Well, the conventional way to disseminate your research is to publish your research findings in academic journals and present them at conferences. These are key ways to get your research known within the academic communities and get your research recognised internationally.
But the problem is that by focusing solely on academic articles and conferences, you may limit the dissemination of your research to a narrow audience comprising mainly researchers and academics in your research area. As a result, your research may not achieve the impact it deserves!
How do you share the key messages of your research with wider audiences and networks that can be potential users of your research? You can engage with these audiences using social media platforms!
If you’re looking for a single platform that will allow you to engage with many audiences, LinkedIn is the place to share your outputs! Why I’m confident that LinkedIn is the place for effective dissemination of research? I started using it to share my research outputs and build an expert profile roughly a year ago. At the time of writing this article, each piece of the academic content I share with my network of 10k members:
– gathers 5,000 – 15,000 views – up to two orders of magnitude more than the traditional outputs
– enables two-way communication and engagement with target audiences
– allows me to raise climate awareness among wide audiences
I can personally confirm it works and it helped me to build meaningful collaborations! So here are the key reasons why you should consider including LinkedIn in your dissemination strategy.
Target audiences on LinkedIn
As I wrote in my previous article on LinkedIn, it is a much more business-oriented platform than Facebook, Twitter or Instagram.
But there is also one more reason why LinkedIn is a platform where you should share your academic papers and outputs in general.
People on this platform are HUNGRY to learn new things and gain new knowledge. That’s why it’s a perfect audience for your research.
Leveraging their hunger for professional and educational knowledge, your research can reach policymakers and professionals interested in your research area much faster. If you just publish your work in academic journals or share it via conference presentations, they may not even know it exists and won’t hear your message!
Therefore, using tools like LinkedIn can bring your research right in front of the relevant people who may use your research or fund your further research! So keep up posting high-quality content and engage with your audience.
Audience engagement on LinkedIn
Speaking about engagement, when you publish your work in academic journals, researchers and academics will be able to find them in scientific databases, such as Scopus or Web of Science. But unless you publish our work in open access journal, it may not be available to a larger audience.
Also, ask yourself the following questions. How likely are you to engage with your readers and discuss your research with them? How do you know the true impact of your key findings made, other than the number of citations your paper received?
The answer? Well, you don’t often get to talk about your research with people who read your article and you never know how it is used.
That’s why two-way engagement with your audience is the true power of social networks, such as LinkedIn. If your network comprises relevant people and you use popular hashtags, people will get interested in your work and will directly engage with it immediately.
That’s why you can use LinkedIn for the rapid dissemination of your research and achieve greater impact in your research career.
Build thought leadership on LinkedIn
Once your content starts gaining traction within your network, you will start being seen as an expert and thought leader in your area. To achieve this, the content you share with your network needs to be of high quality.
How do you produce such content? You’ll need to test what works and what doesn’t for your audience. You’ll also need to be explicitly clear with the message that you’re sharing with your network. There’s a simple rule that I always apply before sharing anything with my network.
Here it is – before you publish, ask yourself if the content you share will add value to your network. It’s as simple as that.
Professional Networking
In addition to sharing your research in various forms (on this later this month!), LinkedIn allows you to engage with existing networks of people who may be potentially interested in your work.
This means that you can connect not only with researchers in your research area, but also with industrialists and policymakers, and the general public! That’s why make sure you adjust the presentation of your work to such audiences when posting your research updates.
So what are the opportunities that LinkedIn brings to your research and career?
Wider dissemination of your research will allow you to develop stronger relationships with organisations beyond academia. This means new opportunities for collaboration, funding and public engagement.
I actively engaged on LinkedIn with my network over the past year. As a result, I met amazing people from around the world and from across different sectors. What was the result? I’ve worked with them on several exciting research and commercial projects that I otherwise wouldn’t think of!
What is more, if you develop your expert brand early, your profile and content may open new career opportunities for you that otherwise wouldn’t be available.
A final word…
Wide dissemination of your research is the best way to get yourself recognised in your research field. However, in the era of social networks, it isn’t just sufficient to publish your work in academic journals and present it at conferences. To build your expert profile, you need to consider other dissemination activities.
In contrast to Facebook, Twitter or Instagram, using Linkedin allows you to really connect with the audience that is eager to learn about the new knowledge that you produce in your research. This is because the audience comprises policy makers, decision makers, CEOs, researchers and academics who are there to build professional relationships and collaborations. Get your work in front of their eyes, and see where this will take you!
I trust this article give you a sufficient reason why you should disseminate your research via LinkedIn. This month in our LinkedIn for researchers series, I will be sharing my insights on what you need to do to efficiently engage on LinkedIn and how you can build your expert brand. If you’ve got any questions that you want me to answer, please reach out or leave a comment below!
Thank you for being a valued member of Motivated Academic!
