Social media profiles: Best practices for mastering your digital footprint

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At the Festival of Learning, I attended Dr. Greg Chan’s sessions:

This was a terrific opportunity to spend a day exploring web visibility in my professional life and planning for changes in my online portfolio. Below are a list of links and random ideas related to the workshop and my learning.

How do I show up?

To check what shows up when I Google myself, open up an incognito window in Chrome and search my name. Any surprises? I was happy to see that what appeared was: my isabeauiqbal.ca site, my CTLT affiliation (I expected this to be lower down), my LinkedIn, Twitter, and then some pictures (mostly me).

Sites: Must have/Good Idea/Maybe

  • According to Greg, the “must join” list is: Twitter, Facebook (just can’t do it), LinkedIn and Google+
    • for research specific: Academia.edu, ORCID and Research Gate (Consider Google Scholar). Greg said ORCiD was especially good for researchers wanting to collaborate and gain greater exposure. The site gives you something like a DOI and also a QR code (which you can make part of your conference presentation)
  • the “strongly consider” joining list is: Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube
  • the “think about” list is: Storify, Litsy

Twitter: Hashtags and Abbreviations to Know about

#WednesdayWisdom
#Scholar Sunday
#AcaDowntime

ICYMI – (in case you missed it)
FTW (for the win) – sometimes about yourself, but can be of someone else to celebrate their accomplishment
HT (hat tip) – give an accolade to
PRT – please retweet (If you want to make RT stronger, tag people)
TT – throwback Thursday
YOLO – you only live once (i.e. photo of you Skydiving or less dramatic)

Building your Site and Hosting

Efficiency

  • Consider Hootsuite or Buffer to manage posts on social media
  • Gravatar – changes your picture in all your social sites
  • Tweet deck  (visually helpful way to see what you want to see on Twitter)

Other

  • PicMonkey: edit your pictures  
  • Medium.com: cross post from my blog to this site (Thanks for the suggestion @trent_g)
  • Fiverr: Hire people to help with WordPress, photo editing and tons more

For additional perspectives on Greg’s sessions, you can also see:
@fol_media            #socialmediaBCTLC         #FoL16

My Next steps for Social Media Presence

As a result of attending Greg’s workshops, here is what I have committed to:

  • Change the look of my existing isabeauiqbal.ca site to something that looks more like kathleenbortolic.com
  • Build my academia.edu profile (was dormant and I only vaguely remembered I had it)
  • I will further explore and consider ORCID, Vitae and Research Gate.

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