Social Media requires followers, but how do you build your social media audience? This article will walk you through ten proven methods for increasing your followers across your social media accounts.

1. Be consistent. You should aim to post two or three times a week, as an academic you should upload engaging and interesting content on a regular basis. This will help build both a new and recurring audience.
2. Know your audience. As an academic your core audience should be other academics and enthusiasts. By using relevant hashtags, you can bring a new audience to your posts. For example, an Astrophysics professor may use the hashtag ‘#SuperNova’ to connect with people interested in this phenomenon.
3. Post original and relevant content. New and innovative content always finds a way to the masses and will excite those who see it. This will in turn encourage your followers to share your posts, broadening your social media exposure.
4. Actively search for and follow others. Social Media is being used more widely by academics and many have extremely interesting blogs, Twitter accounts or Facebook pages. Make sure to follow and promote your peers posts regularly. By sharing their content and engaging with those in your niche will help expand your social network.
5. Link social media accounts to one another. Your audiences may differ on each platform. To make sure that the widest audience sees your post, cross-share your accounts. Usually there is an option on the social media application to share the post to other social media’s.
6. Quality over quantity. Make sure your content is thought provoking and interesting. In theory you could be uploading talks, presentations and papers on a daily basis however, by flooding your social media with trivial posts, you will water down your content and make it lose its appeal.
7. Tell stories. Instagram, for images, and Blogger, for blog posts, are perfect media’s to tell stories. Continuously posting and writing about an ongoing experiment or project heightens a follower’s engagement.
8. Share other peoples content. Re-posting and sharing content from like minded individuals who may or may not have a larger following is another way to attract new followers and spread sciences
9. Be relatable. Post videos using 5minofscience, showing your followers that you are not faceless thus making your content more personal and attractive.
10. Set goals. Lastly by setting short term but specific goals you will enhance your efficiency on social media. These goals will record your social media activity and whether you are being active enough.

Videos are the preferred medium of marketers because of their ability to tell compelling stories. In response to this demand every major social media platform including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Reddit not only allows for videos to be posted, but their algorithm prioritizes them.

One of the biggest obstacles of producing promotional videos used to be their cost. They typically used to cost $5,000 for a 4 minute videos because producers had to bring a large team and heavy equipment on location. At 5minofscience we dramatically cut those cuts by professionally editing videos that researchers film themselves.

Here are some advantages of having promotional videos:

You have a newsletter?

All research institutions send regular e-newsletter to their donors, alumni or staff to update them on their latest accomplishments. It has been demonstrated that having a link to a video significantly boosts these marketing efforts. In fact, a study by Syndacast shows that just having “video” in an email subject line increases open rates by 19%.

You want Google to rank you higher?

What is personal branding?

Personal branding is an ongoing process where individuals market themselves and their careers. The goal is to showcase their strength, experience and abilities in order to access more professional opportunities. The result is a dramatic increase in the individual’s network and circle of influence.

With a strong personal brand, they are more likely to be invited to speak at prestigious events, have newspaper columns, be interviewed by television networks, and publish bestselling books.

When your staff brands themselves as experts outside of the close-knit academic world, both they and your institution benefit. In short, they become a walking advertisement for your institutions.

What are the benefits to your institution?

Done well, personal branding is a free way to leverage your staff’s network and reputation. For instance, academics who have popular Twitter accounts, who are well published or who are on the news whenever a breaking development happens give credibility to your institution.

Since people are more trusted than brands, staff that have a strong personal brand can also dramatically amplify your marketing campaigns. According to the latest figures, having your staff involved in social media should be the priority of your marketing department (from Entrepreneur.com).

• When brand messages are shared by employees on social media, they get 561 percent more reach than the same messages shared by the brand’s social media channels.
• Brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when posted by an employee versus the brand’s social media channels.
• On average, employees have 10 times more followers than their company’s social media accounts.
• Content shared by employees receives 8 times more engagement than content shared by brand channels.

How to tap into this opportunity?

Academics are very busy people. Among other things, they must teach, mark, publish, and network. Despite all that work, we still suggest that you try to write newspaper or magazine articles occasionally.

Publishing for magazines is a great way to improve your writing skills, as your content will be reviewed by experienced editors. This will help you professionally when writing academic papers. Once you get the hang of it, it can also be a lucrative side hustle as publishers are always looking for articles that contain in-depth information and that are written by a experts in the field.

Institutions should encourage their staff to become their brand ambassadors through Social Media (Why Encourage Your Staff To Have A Personal Brand). It is a free way to tap into their network and leverage their reputation in order to promote your institution. According to the latest figures, having your staff involved in social media should be the priority of your marketing department (from Entrepreneur.com).

• When brand messages are shared by employees on social media, they get 561 percent more reach than the same messages shared by the brand’s social media channels.
• Brand messages are re-shared 24 times more frequently when posted by an employee versus the brand’s social media channels.
• On average, employees have 10 times more followers than their company’s social media accounts.
• Content shared by employees receives 8 times more engagement than content shared by brand channels.

However, one of the downside of having your staff being active on social media is that they could potentially damage your institution’s reputation through problematic posts. Although this cannot be minimized, institutions should not micromanage how staff brand themselves and put barriers on their social media activities.

A social media policy outlines how employees should conduct themselves online. It safeguards your institution’s reputation while also encouraging employees to responsibly share the company’s message.

Academics are very busy people. Among other things, they must teach, mark, publish, and network. Despite all that work, we still suggest that you maintain a science blog. It can help you build your career, secure research grants, find collaborators all over the world, and get ideas for new research.

Cross disciplinary collaboration

Professors traditionally publish in academic journals. This is an effective way for your peers to review your work and to read a very technical explanation of your research. Unfortunately, that audience is extremely targeted.

Since inter-disciplinary collaboration is the most effective to identify and solve problems in an ever complex world, your ideas should be exposed as widely as possible. Having a blog reveals your work to researchers who would otherwise never know about it. If they find that there is a link to theirs, they will be able to propose a joint paper.

Such a cross disciplinary paper, by its very nature, will be more likely to break exciting new ground, receive more citations and benefit from more exposure.

Media exposure