Advice on minimal academic social media investment (short post with links)

To a first approximation, I do not think there is anything every academic "must" do. Universities flourish through diversity – diversity gives us breadth and depth. We are teams with each member at every level (administrators, faculty, postdocs, students, adjuncts, lab technicians, and all the other odd job categories we invent.)

But… one thing that is essential if we are going to do knowledge production (which is not the only, and maybe even not the principal thing we do) is that we also disseminate that knowledge. To some extent, every student is also a collection of knowledge – we want them to be findable too.

Therefore, I do recommend every publishing academic making at least a minimum presence on any social media platform that people in your field sometimes use. 

What is a minimum presence? 

• Your name
• A bio saying your field and/or institution
• A URL that links to wherever you do your primary dissemination.

That's it! It takes no more than a few minutes. Unless of course you don't have a place where you do your primary dissemination. In that case, you need to pick one place to link all your papers. The easiest is probably Google Scholar, which I recommend doing anyway. But if you're staying in academia, you probably also want to make (or have your institution make) a webpage with a proper biography, links to your CV, etc.

What does this achieve?

• When other academics cite your work or your talks when they (micro)blog about it on that social media site, they can reference your homepage, which allows them and anyone who reads them to find the rest of your work.

Slightly less minimal

• Add a picture
• Post links to your papers as part of your publication celebration ritual (along with adding it to your webpage, your CV, and any other fun ritual activities.)
• Search for and follow people you respect and/or coauthor with.

These also don't take much time. Especially links to papers can be good, because people who search for you can then see your papers when they look at your home page.

Slightly more information, if you want it

• My current social media policy (where I am posting how). I link to that from each of my social media sites, so people can find where I post more (or less!) often if they hit a site that's not what they were looking for.
• How to microblog conferences. This was about twitter, which when the blogpost was written was (arguably) the most awesome agile communication medium ever invented. Right now I do this on mastodon instead, because I can edit that, then link it to my bluesky account.
• Many paths to academic success. A letter to my newspaper about people panicking because they thought there was only one way their kid could succeed at school. Not entirely to topic but I hope it's reassuring about the diversity claim. 
• You should also create an ORCID, but that's more of an ID than any kind of social media. Julien Colomb on Mastodon suggested ORCID is better than Google Scholar because it will last longer, but my post here isn't intended to be about what lasts; rather it's about what is worth the effort it costs now. Google Scholar is so easy to set up and so useful, that even if I knew it was going away in two months, I'd still tell anyone looking for a job to still set up a profile there. Four months for just regular academic dissemination.

Picking a picture for social media can be a bit trial and error.