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How to Use Social Media to Enhance Research Impact:
Step-by-Step Strategy to Grow Your Online Influence and Make a Bigger Impact
Presenters:
Tinu Abayomi Paul and Kami
Huyse
Sponsored by AIR’s Center on Knowledge Translation
Disability and Rehabilitation Research
(KTDRR)
https://ktdrr.org/training/webcasts/webcast74/index.html
Transcript
for audio/video file on YouTube:
https://youtu.be/EQl731LF-Jo
KATHLEEN MURPHY: Hi, I want to welcome everyone to today's webcast, "How to Use Social Media to Enhance Research Impact, Step-by-Step Strategy to Grow Your Online Influence and Make a Bigger Impact." This is part one of a two-part series.
This webcast is hosted by the Center on Knowledge Translation for Disability and Rehabilitation Research, or the Center on KTDRR. It's housed at the American Institutes for Research, AIR. The Center on KTDRR it is supported by funding from NIDILRR, the National Institute on Disability, Independent Living, and Rehabilitation Research. NIDILRR is a center within the Administration for Community Living, which is part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. My name is Kathleen Murphy, and I'm Director of the Center on KTDRR.
And now let's meet today's presenters, Kami Huyse and Tinu Abayomi Paul. Tinu is the founder of Everywhere Accessible and sits on the board of Global Healthy Living Foundation's Pandemic Patient Support Board.
Kami is founder of Smart Social Secrets that offers online training. She's a digital strategist, speaker, and author of several books. She's won several awards and speaks nationwide on social media, measurement, influence, and strategy.
This webcast is the third in an annual series the Center on KTDRR offers on social media topics, specifically as related to knowledge translation. In this presentation Kami and Tinu will describe a wealth of resources that can help build a strong following on social media for research findings, including especially among members of the disability community. And we'll have some great downloads to help you learn how to apply these tools in your social media presence.
Before we start I did just want to note our presenters will be using the term "disabled population." And they do that deliberately, consciously, by preference. You may notice this is distinct from most of the Center on KTDRR products and events where we do emphasize people-first language. So it's not an official endorsement or a stance of the Center on KTDRR, our partners, or NIDILRR, but will definitely provide you with food for thought.
Speaking of accessibility, you can find a 508-compliant PDF of the slides on our website. And the webcast is captioned. So to open those captions, press the CC button at the bottom of the YouTube video. And if listeners have any accessibility request, please don't hesitate to email us at ktdrr@air.org. Kami and Tinu, are you ready to begin?
KAMI HUYSE: Thank you so much for that amazing introduction. We are really glad to be here today and to share with you some of the things that we've learned about social media and how it can impact what you do with your research. So we're going to be going through five steps today that we have laid out for you to help you get deeper into social media and use it more effectively.
The first one is really about how to build an online community of supporters. Step two is how to develop your voice on social media. Step three is how to define success. Step four is how to get results. And step five is social media best practices.
So we're going to dive right in. So we're going to start with step one, how to build an online community of supporters. Who is the ideal audience and where do you find them? And we're going to focus on three audiences. You may have more than this, but these are the three we're going to focus on today.
Number one is funders. Number two is other researchers, peers. And third are people with disabilities. So we're going to look at these three different types of people and talk about each one.
So starting with the funders, Tinu and I are going to kind of lay out a couple of places you can find them, where to connect and build relationships with them on social media. The first one is LinkedIn. So LinkedIn it is a great place to start with your funders because they're mostly there. They have organizations and they also have their personal profiles.
So what you're going to want to do with that is to use search to your advantage. LinkedIn has a very powerful search engine. Even if you don't pay for the enhanced type of LinkedIn services, you can find people through LinkedIn that you can find very few other places.
One of the best ways to do that is to look at the profile of the funder itself. So if you're looking at specific funders, the best thing to do is go to their page and then click through to see which of their employees are already connected to their page. So you can dive right in and find out who's working for those funders and see if any of them makes sense for you to start to reach out to.
And then over time, you can follow those accounts and just start to see what they're writing about and really start to make those relationships happen. Looking for ways to collaborate, looking for ways to share their content so that they get to know who you are and what you're doing. Also on LinkedIn you can begin to talk about your own research and share it through this kind of situation.
And more recently, in the last year or so, LinkedIn has also put in hashtags as part of its strategy as well. That wasn't the case about a year and a half ago. They've added those hashtags in. So by looking at different hashtags and who's posting under each hashtag, you can start to see which ones are maybe the best ones for you to add to each of your posts.
So the best way to do this, honestly, is through the search-- again-- function of LinkedIn. You can start to put hashtags in the search box and see how popular they are and how many people are following them. And you can kind of see what kind of content comes up under each hashtag.
So I know that, Tinu, you've done some really great research around hashtags, especially for people with disabilities and those kinds of people. So we'll talk about that in a minute with that. But are there also researching hashtags that you've seen for research itself that have kind of become popular?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Yeah, there's a lot of research hashtags that you can use. There's a lot of things that have to do with science, things that have to do with technology, things that connect different audiences together, and also funders. Funders have their own hashtags and ways that they collect information and sort information using the hashtags to find each other through common interests.
So if LinkedIn is where, if you were picturing this in the real world, you would find each other, say, through networking, then Twitter is where you would kind of be hanging out in a restaurant or a bar. So Twitter would connect you through common interests. But they also have Twitter chats, where people share their own knowledge or interview experts in a very low-key, low-pressure way.
So you can either show off that you know things, or lurk and learn things, or connect to people who are experts that you want to learn things from or just want to get to know better. It's the best place to get people who are high-profile to follow you because you said something smart.
KAMI HUYSE: Yeah, and that kind of brings us to number two, which is Twitter hashtags and chats, which you have been extremely active in for the most part. So LinkedIn's really great. It's the professional office version. And so looking at what funders are already putting in and kind of copying that is really important.
But on Twitter, it can be an audience of multiple different relationships. Here we're talking about funders. But how would you find a Twitter chat around a funder thing versus one with people with disabilities talking to each other. We'll talk about that in another slide, but how do you find specifically funders on Twitter?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: That's the trickier thing with Twitter than with LinkedIn, which is why when you're first starting out-- I think especially for researchers-- you might want to lean towards LinkedIn a little bit more at first. Because Twitter doesn't have some central guide of hashtags. You kind of have to find the people first who are kind of in the in-crowd and then look at their profiles. If you already know famous people or well-known people in the industry, and they're on Twitter, you'll see sometimes, in their profiles or in their conversations, what hashtags they're looking and go from there.
You can also just type in topics in the search field, and that'll give you a bunch of results. And you'll see the hashtags. When you click on them, they'll take you into more conversation.
There are also tools out there that you can use for finding the tags and categories that you want to use. So you can go with tools like All Hashtags and kind of build your list from the words that you usually use when you're trying to find something, say, in Google search. So if you had set up Google Alerts, or you're normally doing your research-- like, if I was a person who was researching fibromyalgia, I would start there. And that would give me a list of words that I could use to find the hashtags that I need in a tool like All Hashtags.
KAMI HUYSE: And it's not direct, right? And the other thing is, even without tools, the actual search engines themselves-- I mean, I call them search engines-- but LinkedIn, Twitter, they're like search engines as well. And there's even an advanced search on Twitter.
So one of the easiest way to find Twitter advanced search-- I mean, you can do it through once you've done research, there's a way. But if you just say, advanced search Twitter, on a Google search it will pop up the link. But it gives you a much more in-depth way to search on Twitter that most people don't even know exists. Right?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Right. And if you already know the hashtags that you want, you'll find out that some of them are more active than others and also that people use them for different things. For "fibromyalgia," they're usually talking about official things. For "fibro," they're usually having casual conversations. And sometimes one is more popular than the other.
If you just type the hashtag, just the hashtag symbol, it'll show you what's trending. If you type a couple of letters, like the first five letters of "fibro," they'll show you a list of everything that contains those five letters and which ones are trending. So you can see, OK, well, I want a lot of people to see this right now. Is it appropriate for me to use that trending hashtag, or should I take one of these other ones? So Twitter and some of the other tools will also help you out.
KAMI HUYSE: That's really good. And then number three, of course, is Facebook and Instagram ads. And we put that in here as probably the best way to reach people on Facebook and Instagram. Because Facebook and Instagram tends to be a more consumer tool, I would say, people that are there for their grandkids and there to connect with their friends, or whatever. But it does have a very strong search aspect through the ads tool.
So one of the cool things that you can do is run a very small ad-- like $5, $10, $20. You don't have to spend a lot of money-- to a specific audience. So people that have certain interests, people that follow certain pages. If there are really well-followed pages, like a very big thing in your industry that everybody follows, you can sometimes actually tag those in the ads manager if they have a big enough following. So they won't be there if it's a page with 5,000 followers. But if it's a page with 100,000 followers plus or whatever, you probably can actually target those people through an ad.
And so that's another way to reach people through these two tools, Facebook and Instagram. And they're owned by the same company. We can all discuss whether we like them or not. But it is very easy for you to say, you know, people that have an institute are using "fibromyalgia," people that are interested in fibromyalgia.
They're not going to give you people who have it. They're going to be people who are interested or follow a specific page. That's how they work that. And then they'll show that ad to people.
And you don't even have to make it an advertising type of ad. I'm doing air quotes here for those who can't see that. But you can post something and then just boost it to those people so they see your content. So I think sometimes we kind of get confused what an ad--
It doesn't have to be like, here's the ad. I'm trying to sell you something. It could be something like, here's some really great information and where you can find it. And it will target to the people that really need to see it. And it can be cheap. So it can be very inexpensive.
And then finally, blogs. I'm going to let you talk a little bit about blogs. We've been blogging for a very long time, both Tinu and I, right?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Yes. I wont date us. I won't say how old we are. But yes, very long time we've been blogging. Long enough that it used to be that the standard amount of blogging you did was several times a day. And now it's kind of once a week to keep up an active blog.
And just to go back to Facebook ads for a minute, the way that I got my blog to be popular-- originally when I had a tech blog-- was I used the Facebook boost on my professional page to get more people to see that I had posted my blog post for the day. And they got so much more exposure. I also started out with free Facebook ads and the free sample ads for each platform.
So before you get started with ads, just do a quick search and see if they're offering any free ads. I saw the other day that there were a free amount of Instagram ads if you did some-- I don't know what thing you have to do to get the ads. But just do a quick Google search to see if there are any coupons that you could use that, if you did a certain amount of purchase, you'll get some free ads. Sometimes you don't have to do a purchase at all.
KAMI HUYSE: Yeah, LinkedIn's really actually pushing that right now. The LinkedIn ads are doing that because they really want us to use LinkedIn ads. I got an offer the other day. So yeah, you would definitely want to look at that.
But moving to blogs, though. Are blogs outdated? I mean, is blogging an outdated thing? Should we be blogging anymore?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: We should be blogging, because you always want to have something that you own. Like, what if something came along that was better than Facebook, or that was better than Instagram? Or there was-- I can't even remember the name of it anymore. For a while, there was this great video tool where four people could get on a video.
KAMI HUYSE: Oh, Blab.
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Blab-- it was so popular. Everybody loved it. In a snap, it was just gone. It was never replaced. Everybody lost the thousands of people they collected there.
And you can't get those connections back. But people who built a following, who built an email list, who started a blog, people knew where to find them after that. And they kept those connections.
If you get accidentally kicked off a platform, for example. I once accidentally got kicked off of Pinterest. And it turned out to just be a computer glitch, thank goodness. Because what do you do to get kicked off of Pinterest? And if I had gotten kicked off, then that would have been terrible. I would have lost all of my connections from the past 10 years.
Thankfully, it was just a glitch. But I would have lost all those connections. But I also built an email list, so all of those people still would have been able to find me on my blog. You want to build something that's yours, where people can find you, where, if you wanted to send people to your whole body of work, they could find it in one place.
And it's not as big of commitment as it was before. You can just update your blog weekly with one short post about what you're doing right now. You don't have to give away all your secrets or anything.
You can just talk about things that you're interested in and start a conversation about your industry. Or just curate interesting things that you read and make a longer post than you would at Facebook, or on LinkedIn, or Twitter. Or direct conversations that you started in social media back to your blog, so you can control what happens.
KAMI HUYSE: Yeah. And you just said something too. On LinkedIn, you can do longer-form posts, which they call "Pulse." Actually, at this point, they don't even call it "Pulse" anymore. They just basically say, hey, you want to do this document, or share a document, or you could do this longer bit. And so whenever you click and start a post, it will give you all kinds of ways to do that.
But one of the things that I think is really good about that is that you can always do a short excerpt of what's on your website and then send people from LinkedIn to that longer excerpt on your own platform. And the reason why that's really important is because, like Tinu said, you want to have the ability to do that plus search. We haven't even said anything about search. But when people are searching for your topic, you want them to be able to find you.
And if you have stuff that's going up on a regular basis, you don't even have to call it a blog. It could be your news section or whatever. But having regular content that's going up on your website in that kind of a format-- where it's a reverse chronological format, meaning the most latest thing is up there-- is going to help you to grow what I call "thought leadership," both on your social media channels and within your industry and be at the top of mind.
So that's why you need to choose your platform. So we've given you a couple of examples of platforms you can use. So choose the platform that makes the most sense for you, whether it's LinkedIn, Twitter-- if you're trying to reach funders-- and then start to post regularly and interact regularly with people in the community. So that way, you become top of mind for your audience.
So that being said, I'm going to move on because I don't want to stay in this one forever. We could talk about each one forever, because there's a lot to talk about each time. But what about your peers, reaching out to your peers? Maybe you want to collaborate more or build those relationships across. And there's a couple of really great places you can do that.
Again, we think LinkedIn is great for that. LinkedIn really is a great place to follow your peers and then be able to share their content and have them share your content. So I don't know. What do you think about that, Tinu?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: It's a great place to also start a buddy system. It's really hard to self-promote for a lot of people. And even for people who it's easy to self-promote for, sometimes it feels icky. You don't want to say, hey, I am the best at this. Who is going to believe you besides your mom? You want to have someone else say it. It lends a better air of credibility, especially if the other person is also very good in their field.
So it's good to buddy up or to group up and to be able to talk about each other to collaborate, to share each other's work. In LinkedIn, I think that's a great place to start, because you already have a small professional network. You also don't know necessarily who all of the other people that each other knows.
It's a very good way to be able to see what other networks that each other has. It's a very good way to start the spread of the information that you want to spread, to pass along information that you want to pass along. And a good place to start just thought leadership would be in LinkedIn, because it's very easy for you to be able to present longer pieces of information and have the audience already targeted that wants to actually read what you write.
And once you've actually started to build those relationships, you can move over to Twitter a little bit, if that is your thing. Because you don't have to use all of the social networks. What I usually do is find the one-- I found the one that really resonates with me, and then I kind of participate a little bit in a couple of others that I also really like. But I really laser-focus on one and then kind of participate a little bit in others.
My main place is Twitter. And the most active hashtag for people in science and tech is #SciComm. #SciComm is science communication. It's for early-career researchers, people who are doing things in science labs, just all kinds of people who are doing anything in the intersection of science and communication.
It can help you get more specific tips. It can help you find Twitter chats. It can help you find peers to help you find all the hashtags that you're looking for. It's just a good place to start. It's also an active hashtag on Instagram. So if you're just listening to all this information saying, OK, that sounds good, but I need an asking step, try putting #SciComm into the hashtag search and seeing who you come up with.
As far as blogging as well, you're going to find some of the blogs of other researchers that are going to give you some ideas of what you might want to do. But I would say that you want to be a listener. You want to look at what other people are doing, and don't jump into blogging too soon. Kind of observe what other people are doing.
And if you really want to make great friends, reply to somebody's blog post, because people don't really do that anymore. And they will just go crazy for that. Because people love to have conversations on their own blogs.
KAMI HUYSE: That's a good way to stand out. And the #SciComm, by the way, you can put that in LinkedIn as well. There's not as many people following it there, but it is growing. There's about over 1,000 people that are following #SciComm on LinkedIn right now. I just looked that up so I can tell you that.
But I think that that's really something that you might want to consider. That's a great way to start. And then you can see what other hashtags are going around that as well.
So you'll see people use multiple different hashtags, especially on Instagram. It's a great place to find a ton of different ideas for hashtags. You put one in. You find one post, and you'll see that they've used multiple hashtags in there. So that's great.
And I agree about the blogging, too. We do recommend you do have a place to start, even if it's a landing page with maybe a place where people can put their email in for more information. So you can tell them what you're up to with your research or whatever.
And I don't know. That depends on your different professions and stuff and if there are any regulations for gathering that information. So you want to make sure that you're looking into that.
Awesome. So that's how you start connecting with your peers. And I found that that has been the most edifying for me in my profession, in my career, was knowing other people-- like Tinu, that's how we met, through that. Knowing other people that were in the same profession as I am, and that we could support each other as we're going for it.
So I love the buddy system that you were talking about, Tinu. I think that's just excellent. Because it really does make you feel less alone in social media, for sure.
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Yes, definitely. I wanted to say one more thing about what you brought up with the LinkedIn hashtag, because it slipped my mind. It's really smart to get an early. So if less than 1,000 people are using a hashtag, that is the time to help it grow, because then you're one of the pioneers. So that was a really good point that you brought up.
KAMI HUYSE: Awesome. So the third one we're going to talk about is the disabled population. And I'm going to actually let you start this, Tinu, and give people some context for where you come from, and who you are specifically on this topic, and why we even have this word, "disabled population." So let's talk about that a little bit, because I think that's really important for them to understand where you're coming from.
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Yes, definitely. So just to get the whole idea about "disabled population" out of the way, I refer to myself as a disabled person. But that is not in conflict with the respect for the idea of people with disabilities. I have a great respect for the years-- the decades-- of research, and academic, as well as real-world, experience, and, I want to say, support that has come from changing the way that we talk about people who have disabilities. And I understand the logic behind "people with disabilities" and people-first language, so that people can see that we are people first.
What has happened out of that in some areas that we as disabled people deal with is that people still see the disability part as a bad thing. So we're going through-- especially the younger people-- kind of a reclamation of the word "disabled." So we insist when people are speaking with us, especially the younger people, that if we're speaking one-on-one, people call us "disabled."
If people are speaking to us as a group, we don't mind if people say "people with disabilities." It's not really a big deal. If it gets awkward, we don't mind if they also say "disabled." But we do understand what people-first language is trying to achieve. And we don't want to necessarily be in conflict with that.
So a quick hack, if you're not sure how to address disabled people and you're having a direct conversation with us, just ask. How do you like to be addressed if I'm talking about disability? It's very simple. Just ask us. For me, I prefer "disabled."
I became a leader in the disabled community after I had cancer. Before that I had several invisible disabilities already. But in 2016, I got cancer, and it was the disabled community that embraced me and helped me get through it. And through that time, there were so many things that I could not do that I could do before I had cancer.
And in that time, I started writing about it, and talking about it, and wondering why people don't discuss cancer, and don't discuss fibromayalgia, and why aren't there resources to help me talk about why I couldn't get on disability, and why people don't talk about brain fog and fatigue, and walking with my cane, and how people treat me in public when I'm by myself as a disabled person, or seen in my car, and things like that.
So I realize there's several levels of disability. There's people who may have language disabilities. There's people who have mental disabilities. There's this whole range, but people have this one picture in their mind. So that's how the whole thing came about. So of course, ask questions. Just ask us, and we'll give you very honest feedback, especially if you're addressing us the way that we wish to be addressed. [INAUDIBLE] right there.
So how do you actually get us to talk to you? The easiest way, on Twitter especially, is come to our meetings. Listen to us and then just interact with us. And do small favors-- things like retweets, things like asking us respectful questions, things like liking our posts, following us, interacting with us over common interests like TV shows. Just get to know us as people. And before you know it, we'll be including you. And we may ask you if you need anything before you even ask us.
And these are things that it sounds like, oh, that sounds like a lot of work. It's really not. It's something you can accomplish in five minutes a day. Follow five people. Follow one chat. Ask one question. It doesn't have to be a big commitment.
For Instagram have tags, it's going to be a little bit easier because Instagram is all about images. It's all about did you like it or didn't you like it. It flows a little bit faster, and the conversation isn't as deep. So it's kind of a faster decision and a faster connection. Either you're going to follow somebody or you're not. Either you're going to come into the hashtag or you're not.
So the Instagram hashtags are somewhat similar to Twitter hashtags. And I know this because I created a 40-page guide on the patient-facing hashtags on Twitter. And I noted that they're similar to the Instagram hashtag, because we're started a guide for that too.
So you'll find that it's not terribly hard to find the patients in Instagram and to be able to ask them questions and find out if they'll give you feedback. They're pretty friendly as long as you don't come off right away asking favors. But that's just simple logic. You don't meet somebody the first thing and say, can you give me a ride to the airport? You develop a little bit of a relationship first.
For Facebook groups it's going to be a little bit harder, because groups are closed. You usually have to be invited to come to talk to them. The easiest way to get invited to those are to make friends with the person who runs the group on a different platform-- that's one way. Or to find where they blog. That's a little bit easier to find. Find their blog, reply through comment, or email them. Because people usually put their contact information on their blog posts.
Friending people on Facebook to get into their Facebook groups, it sounds like that's a logical step, but people will say, who is this person? And if you don't have any mutual connections, they are not going to accept your request.
KAMI HUYSE: These are good. These are really good tips, Tinu. Can you kind of just explain to us-- because you built a pretty active community on Twitter. Could you explain how you're doing that, what hashtags you're currently using for your own, and kind of give, just as a case study, how you're using it?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: OK, a case study for me. I start at the end. What did I want to build? I wanted to build a space where I could teach people who were in my shoes in the beginning, other-- we call ourselves "spoonies."
If you want to learn about that, read something called "The Spoon Theory." It's about how people with invisible disabilities navigate the world. It's kind of a story about our energy usage and fatigue.
So I wanted to teach other spoonies how to get through the day. Things like if you're going to go downstairs, pack a bag so you don't have to go up and down the stairs. There wasn't anything really out there that taught us the little tips. So I wanted to build a platform like that.
But I also wanted it to be something where, if I didn't have anything to say, I could introduce other people to each other. There was a chat for that, but it only happened once a week. People could use a #spoonie hashtag to meet each other, but only if they knew about spoonie chat. But lots of people knew about Twitter but didn't know about the hashtag.
So I wanted to bring all of that information together, help newbies, help them learn about the hashtag, and then help people find information. So I started to find people who were new on the Twitter platform. I would talk to them. And then if they said something clever or had a clever tip, I would retweet them. And at the time, I had something like 10,000 followers. And it was just not normal for somebody with that many followers to be retweeting somebody who had, like, 100 or 200.
So people started to flock to me to see if I was going to lend them my platform if they came up with good ideas. And as that began to grow, I also attended a lot of Twitter chats. And I also boosted the information of, OK, people are going to have chats.
Then I started to build resources. And the resources that I built I started building on Twitter. And I started with hashtags, because once I tagged the hashtag in Twitter, it would show up in that hashtag that I was talking about their hashtag. So those people would come and thank me for talking about the hashtag.
And so when you've done it for 200 different hashtags of people who have communities of thousands of people using the hashtag, Bob's your uncle all of a sudden. You've got people from everywhere at the top organizations thanking you for spreading the word about them and doubling the number of people of their chat.
Then you've got doctors following you all of a sudden, and senators paying attention to things that you say. And all of a sudden Twitter's verified your account, and you don't even know what you did. So share your platform. I would say curate something that's important to you but doesn't compete with your work.
KAMI HUYSE: Yeah, and I want to dive in a little bit to what a Twitter chat is, because we haven't actually defined that. And I do think a lot of people may not have a clue what we're talking about. So Twitter chats are?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Twitter chats. Twitter chats are conversations, open conversations, between a group of people on a shared topic using that hashtag. A host will come up with a question that they address to the group that everybody answers, or to a featured expert that everybody answers after the expert answers.
And they'll share the answers they like the best with their audience. So that's making it so that all the most clever answers are shared with a wider audience of people. So that's what makes it so compelling.
It's also very low friction because most of the answers and the participation is in text, because Twitter is a mostly text-based platform. You can add audio. You can add video. You can add photos with Alt text, and hopefully your audio or video has captions, or you'll get yelled at.
KAMI HUYSE: You will.
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: We're a big fan of accessibility there. Recently, we had Twitter take down their audio tool because they launched it without captions. But being that it's mostly text-based, it's very easy to participate and then also be, say, eating lunch or watching TV or something.
So it's very easy to participate. It's also very easy to lurk. It's also very easy to build yourself an archive of things that people have said and save information for later, or come back later and read up on things that people have said, build a library of knowledge. So that's what's great about Twitter chats. And they're all also run by hashtag.
KAMI HUYSE: Right. And Twitter chats also happen at a specific time and place. So it'll to be, like, on a Thursday at 1:00, or whatever, or one's the second Friday of every month. So they all exist out there. There's not one big repository of where to find them unfortunately. You have to look around.
I know that Tinu has built an entire list of that. So if you check her out on Twitter, you will be able to find some of these things through just looking at her account. So you might want to do that.
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Most of the time, it's my pinned tweet. That's one of the things you can do on Twitter, is pin one message to stay on your account all the time. A lot of people use a type of tweet where you can fill out your name and email.
Some people use a link to their website or a little blurb about me. Some people will put the thing that they have that's on sale or their most recent project. I usually put up my most recent update of that hashtag list. Or I have my information in the slide, you can just come ask me.
KAMI HUYSE: Yeah. There you go. That being said, I'm going to move on to step two. Step two is really how to develop your voice on social media. And this is really, really important because this is who you are going to be on social media.
Of course, you're yourself. But what is it you're going to stand for? Who are you going to be? What are people going to come to you and ask?
So what's really important here is to talk about who your primary audience is. So who is the audience that you're trying to reach? So we just talked about the three possibilities. You may be going after funders. You may be going after peers. You may be going after people with disabilities in their communities.
So tell us how you want to develop your voice on social media by telling us first who your primary audience is. So that's a really, really important. And you may want to talk to funders on LinkedIn but talk to people with disabilities on Twitter, versus those kinds of things. So you're going to want to think about where you want to do each of these things.
And one of the things that I think is really important to understand-- and we'll go over it a little bit more in depth-- is this understanding of this academic voice and why it really doesn't work on most of the channels. Even if you're talking to funders, you may have some things that you want to put out there that are academic, but using that truly academic voice can kind of build a barrier between yourself and the people you're trying to reach, even if they know what you're talking about.
Because people want to talk to other people, right? That's really the key. Do you want to talk to the Nike logo? No, but you would be very happy if somebody from Nike on Twitter responded to you and you had a conversation. That would be cool. You would actually talk about that to your friends and to your neighbors.
So you want to think about that when you're developing your own online voice. And the ones that tend to work the best-- even from brands or even from other kinds of researchers and so on-- are this human voice. You want to have a human voice, whatever it is.
And language really matters too. I think Tinu talked a little bit about her feelings about the way she likes to call herself. And so the way that we want to talk about certain things can't be what we force into the culture that's in social media.
So one of the first things I learned on social media is-- I learned this kind of the hard way. I have to be honest-- is the idea that you have to be sort of an anthropologist when you're on social media. You have to listen to how the community responds to each other and the norms, the social norms, that are going on in that community on social media.
So when we first came out, Tinu-- and you'll know this is true-- there was a culture that we had to give each other credit. So if you found something and you shared it, you'll see "h/t," which means hat tip, hat tip to @Tinu. So I would be required to do that. And if I didn't, then I would get some flak from people. They'd be like, well, I hear that with you, you didn't give me any credit.
But what was interesting is that I became so entrenched in that from the social media side that a friend of mine told me about something, and I shared it on social media. It was public. It was an article. And I gave her credit, and she's like, take that down. Take that down. She did not want credit.
And I realized, oh my gosh, I got this really strong culture that doesn't exist in this other community. So I think that that's really the most important thing when you go into social media, is to take some time to just watch and listen for a while.
And in just a few minutes, I'll give you a really great 2-by-2 formula that I use to connect. So we'll get you into the nuts and bolts in a minute. But really understanding that language matters and culture. I mean, I could've said culture matters here too, right? What do you think?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Yeah, language and culture.
KAMI HUYSE: And have you found that to be something that a lot of people don't quite grasp? And is that how they get in trouble in social media?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Very much so. Very much so. Especially just coming into communities they don't understand. We get it a lot when we're talking to med Twitter in the disabled community, or when they're talking amongst themselves about us, and one of us figures out that they're talking about patients.
It get very messy. They might have, like, casual codes that they're using to talk about us. And then a disabled doctor will say, wait a minute, I'm disabled. And you shouldn't do that. And it gets not great.
KAMI HUYSE: Yeah, so spending some time just getting to know the culture that you're in is really, really important. So knowing your primary audience is part of that, is knowing who you're actually trying to reach. Because those are the ones that you want to find out where they are with the culture part. So really interesting.
Then the second thing is-- really, I was kind of diving into the academic voice not working here. Can you kind of go through this a little bit about talking to one person? Have you done that?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Yeah, that's the way I talk in articles that I write, unless I'm specifically instructed not to, and when I write in social media. And I think it's part of what makes the things that I write go so popular.
I imagine a person in my audience that I'm trying to reach, and what their pain is, and how what I'm going to write is going to relieve whatever pain that they're having. And I try to think of what language am I using that will make a barrier between us.
You know me. I like big words. And I try, when I'm writing to a wider audience, not to use so many of my fancy words that I use to [INAUDIBLE] stuff all the time. Because it just creates this barrier between me and the person that I'm trying to reach.
Not everybody knows all the terms that I know. Optimization and gamification, not everybody knows those words. And I don't really need to use them to show off. So I have to put the things that I want to say in simple terms so that people understand them, especially if I want them to learn something from me, or especially if I want them to buy something from me eventually, or download something, or even to listen to what I'm saying.
And then also about growing a thick skin. Especially for women researchers out there, women journalists, women everything, for some reason there's a lot of resistance to us being out there from certain people. And we're not always welcomed with open arms. So sometimes people make not just inappropriate comments, but just throwaway comments to us. And you gotta sometimes be able to brush that off, because it's not part of your mission to have to stop what you're doing and deal with, for example, troll behavior or harassment, or things like that, or people who want to argue with you about you being a topic expert on something.
One funny story is there was a lady online who's the top researcher at something. A guy at a conference tried to quote her back to herself and say that her research was better than her own research. So you got to kind of be ready for those kinds of things and not let them faze you, because they're going to happen.
And until they develop or decide to deploy a better way to deal with those things, we're kind of stuck with what we have now. And we can't really let those things stop us from rising.
KAMI HUYSE: No, I love that in rising. And the other thing that I think is really important to point out in all of this is that, when you're out there talking, it's really about the people that you're talking to, the people you're trying to reach. So we talked about that audience, but it's not really about you. You may use some stuff that you've done as an example, but it can't be about your research, and what you want, and what you need. It has to be about who you're trying to reach and what they need.
You talked about pain points, which is also a thing in the marketing lingo but. What that really means is that knowing what is really stopping people from getting what they want out of life and helping them get there through what you are saying online. So I love that. Thanks for sharing that.
So the other thing we want to talk about is why language is so important in social media. We've already kind of touched on this a bit. But I think one of the biggest thing is that context cues are missing.
So there is really an issue there. Because especially if you have people with disabilities too, there's even more context cues that are missing. So you need to be very clear about what you're saying and what you're trying to accomplish.
And also you have to understand your audience. I mean, that's really the biggest thing. The more you know who your audience is and the more you can talk to them directly, the better your communication and so on is going to be.
And then we've already talked about this a little bit, but I'm going to open this up again. And I want to just go from a slightly different angle here, Tinu, as far as when you're talking to people. I mean how can we avoid this? Because "people with disabilities" is the thing that's been drilled into pretty much anybody's head that's on this conference call. So tell us what you would suggest?
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Well, I appreciate that point. Because when I first started referring to myself as disabled, I got a lot of pushback anytime I talked to somebody academic, anytime I talked to somebody who was in a nonprofit organization. They kept telling me that I was a person with disabilities. I was not disabled. And I thought, well, if I want to call myself "disabled," and you're telling me to call myself something else, it's kind of infantilizing me. You're telling me I can't call myself what I would like to call myself.
So I would say just try to learn more and respect our point of view on this. Me being an older member of this audience, I struggled with it in the beginning. And then I saw their point. And I wrote about it-- it's on Medium-- why I changed my mind about it.
And I had an experience about this before I went public myself with my disabilities. And I remember an incident where I told somebody that they were a person with disabilities. And that's how I realized what I was doing, that I was forcing my own perspective on other people.
But I realized that's not what organizations are doing. That's not what any of the people who are listening to this are doing. But the people who have come to this awakening sometimes feel that way, even though that's not what you're putting out.
And the problem is, as Kami said, the context cues are missing. Most of communication is nonverbal, but with social media, all we have is the text that we're looking at. So it being a sore point for us right now, we see "people with disabilities," and we go off. We go ham.
On the other hand, if you're not writing directly to us, we're learning we don't have to go nuts. It's not-- well, excuse me. That's ableist. We don't have to get angry if it's not directly involving us.
So you will experience some pushback about it. I would say if you're referring to us in general, it's going to be OK. And we remember and respect where the point of view comes from. As long as you're not forcing that on people, or don't appear to be forcing that on people, it's not going to be a problem.
I would say clarify your point of view if you get pushback. You can always say, we're not saying that all people should call themselves "people with disability." We're just saying, this is the policy of our organization, and it's because of this model of disability that we align ourselves with. It's not because we feel that you can't--
KAMI HUYSE: It's because of respect.
TINU ABAYOMI PAUL: Yeah, it's our way of paying respect. It's not us trying to tell you what to do. And as long as it comes with that understanding, there isn't going to be a problem.
Because if it wasn't for the movement that gave us "people with disabilities," we wouldn't have come to "disabled." We wouldn't have gotten to that reclamation point. And that's the part that sometimes gets lost in these discussion.
KAMI HUYSE: Yeah, so thank you for letting us talk about it here. I know it's kind of a touchy subject. So thank you for letting us talk about it, because I think it's an important one to hear about. And it probably won't be a perspective you hear a lot.
So thanks, Tinu, for giving us that perspective, being somebody in the community, and really being a huge leader in that community. So we appreciate that.
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