Social media is a powerful tool for promoting your own work and interacting with your research community – so get yourself out there!

Guest contributor Steve Hurst

{credit}Image credit: Venimo{/credit}

If you have a question about deer or goat behaviour, then Dr Alan McElligott is your go-to guy. His research on the evolution, ecology and communication of large mammals, particularly ungulates, has seen him appear on a diverse set of media outlets, from the BBC to Modern Farmer and countless others.

When Alan’s latest co-authored paper ‘Intrasexual selection drives sensitivity to pitch, formants and duration in the competitive calls of fallow bucks’ was published, his first thought was to contact his institution’s press department, but his second – like an ever increasing number of researchers – was to expand the reach of his work beyond the usual scientific community through social networking sites.

Last year a survey by Nature found that nearly 50% of researchers have a professional presence online and, of the subset of scholars who said they ‘regularly visited’ social media sites, 37% visited Twitter daily. Alan uses Twitter and likes to engage with other people who are interested in his work. Continue reading →