Social Media to Promote Research: Blogs

Blogging is a good way to communicate your research to both academic and non-academic audiences. Blogging is more time consuming than other social media platforms such as Twitter, however blog posts can be particularly useful for communicating more complex ideas, for developing your profile and reputation as a researcher, and building an audience for your research.

Below are some ideas of things you can blog about:

• Write about the background to your research
• Research updates
• Share new things you learn
• Commentary posts on current events
• Posts which link back to your own research
• Report on a conference

Source: Mollett, Amy, et al. Communicating Your Research with Social Media: A Practical Guide to Using Blogs, Podcasts, Data Visualisations and Video. SAGE, 2017.

You may want to set up an analytics tool e.g. Google Analytics, on your blog to monitor traffic and track where readers are coning from, and which blog posts they are most interested in etc.

The London School of Economics and Political Science wrote a useful blogpost on "How to write a blogpost from your journal article"