By Skyla Baily, GDI Digital Communications Officer

In our thoroughly online world, just how important are platforms like LinkedIn when it comes to sharing you research? How can it help reach relevant audiences and provide opportunities for career development? 

There can be a reluctance in academia to lean into social media and digital platforms, but if you are an academic thinking about building up your presence, LinkedIn is where we recommend you start. Over the past few years the GDI communications and impact team has seen a significant growth in users and engagement on LinkedIn, as other platforms like X topple. More and more academics, institutions and organisations are turning to it as the place to connect and share.

Let’s dive into some of the reasons why LinkedIn can be useful to you as a researcher:  

• Increased visibility: LinkedIn has reached over 1.1 billion users worldwide and continues to expand year-on-year. Posting your work here taps into a significant audience of peers and public.

• Audience quality: Unlike other social medias, LinkedIn makes it much more likely that your research will be seen by people who it is relevant to or who you know. As a platform marketed toward professionals, it largely escapes being bogged down in people’s personal lives, focusing much more on the research at hand. Your feed will be made up of posts that have been made by your connections, as well as accounts and posts that they interact with.

• Networking: As stated, there are billions of people on LinkedIn, and at least some of them are people it would be beneficial to connect with. Whether it be colleagues, other academics in your discipline, policymakers, or collaborators, LinkedIn can be a much more effective tool than a cold email when it comes to making links and staying up to date. It is effectively a professional, dynamic contact list.

• A virtual CV: With all of your institutional postings and papers on your profile, your LinkedIn acts like a virtual CV that will remain as you move between posts, countries, or focuses.

• Job searching: LinkedIn is also one of the most popular platforms used by people looking for new opportunities – GDI posts all of its open job roles directly on our feed. Around 6 people are hired every minute through LinkedIn.

 

Building your profile

 

Building up your profile is important – it is the face you are putting forward to peers and the public and that will represent you online. Here are some tips: 

• Include a photo: This is essential, as it makes it so much easier for those who know you to find and connect with you. It also increases engagement with your content significantly – people like to know there is a face behind the work that they read. LinkedIn members with a photo receive 21x more profile views and 9x more connection requests.

• Keep your bio updated: This is a perfect place to let people know what you are currently working on, what your research interests are, or even just your current position.

• Make sure your institution is listed as your employer: This will mean that you show up in the employee section for that institution and will makes it easier for your colleagues to find and connect with you. Connecting with your institution is also a great way of increasing the visibility of your research, as they are more likely to reshare anything you post.

Now you have your profile set up and it looks great – what next? 

• Follow pages and people who are relevant to your interests, and send people connection requests. You can personalise your connection requests to say hello, introduce yourself, or remind people if you might have met before. The more people you connect with, the greater an audience you will have, and the more relevant that audience is likely to be.

• Join LinkedIn Groups. There are many groups on LinkedIn, including alumni groups, pages for calls for papers and grants, research groups, or research topics that encourage conversation and exchange. Post your own work and announcements in them for greater visibility and engagement. 

 

Sharing your research on LinkedIn

 

If you are part of an institution, your department might share you research for you. If they do, make sure to repost anything to do with you – A 2022 study found that page posts (for example your department’s page) with at least one share received on average 208% more impressions and 300% more comments. This will be even greater if you are sharing it directly to your audience that cares about you and your work. 

Whilst reposting is good and important, your department might not make an original post or you might to do one yourself. Regardless of whether they have already shared it, I would suggest doing this anyway – even if your department has a large following on its page, personal posts from academics themselves almost always outperform. 

There are several different ways to share your work on LinkedIn, and below I will take you through some of the most effective, as well as best practice. 

 

Posts 

The most basic way of sharing information is in a bog-standard post. This will go out to your connections, though if they in turn like, comment or repost, its views may increase exponentially as it echoes across more and more feeds. Posting is an easy way to get a great deal of eyes on your research. 

• Think hard about your first two lines. When you scroll through a feed, LinkedIn often collapses posts so that you can only preview the first two lines of a post. Make sure that these will make someone want to click and read on.

• Try to keep your whole post engaging, to-the-point, and not too long. If you are posting lots of long paragraphs, people are likely to scroll away. Instead, tell them what the research is, why its important, and then link or include the research itself (more on this later).

• Always tag your collaborators, institution, journal, etc. This will bring your post into their feeds and that of their connections, and is good etiquette when you have produced something in collaboration. To tag someone, type @ and then their name. Top tip – if you are struggling to find who you are looking for, try following their name with their workplace.

Posting is also a great way of sharing achievements, casual research updates, conferences you are attending, or other research you are excited about. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you should only post when something momentous has happened – people are interested in the research journey, and in you. 

 

How to present your research

As with all social media and websites, your content is fighting for attention. Just posting a link to your research is not going to make your post stand out or stop the scroll. 

You also want to reduce the amount of steps its going to take for someone to reach your work. In other words, how many times do they have to click before they can read your paper? 

There are two ways to combat this and get eyes on your research: 

• PDF uploads

This is a great way of getting people to read your research immediately. LinkedIn offers the ability to upload a document directly to your post, so why not upload the PDF of your article? 

A 2022 study found that native documents – as in posts consisting of docs/PDF images uploaded directly on LinkedIn – generate 3x more clicks than any other type of content.

 

 

• Pictures

Recently, LinkedIn changed so that its link previews appear small and condensed. If you do want to link to your research paper rather than posting it directly (maybe it’s not open-access), then do include a link but add a picture as well. Posts that include images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts. This could be anything from an infographic to a photo from your fieldwork or writing process. It could be the title of the paper or a screenshot of the abstract. 

If you have a communications team in your institution, reach out to them for support. At GDI we are more than happy to help provide images. 

 

Articles 

Articles are long form, in-depth content that are distributed to your LinkedIn connections and beyond. Articles typically consist of professional insights – in your case, research insights. They are similar to a blog. 

They are displayed in the Activity section of your profile, and are shared with your connections and followers in their news feeds, and sometimes through notifications.

These articles will appear in google like any article hosted on a news site.

 

 

Now you have the tools to begin sharing your work on LinkedIn. Reaching larger audiences through an accessible platform is an easy way of increasing the likelihood of your research generating impact, and will have personal benefits to you and your career as you build up your network of professional connections. 

The GDI Comms and Impact team is always on hand to support researchers in GDI. For any questions about this article, please email skyla.baily@manchester.ac.uk

 

Please feel free to use this post under the following Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Full information is available here.

Featured photo by Abid Shah on Unsplash