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“No one will take you seriously if you don’t have a noteworthy presence,” said Jason Schenker, an economist who specializes in economic forecasting and has purchased at least 260,000 followers.
NYTimes, 1/27/18 The Follower Factory
Do academics ever buy Twitter followers?
Did you see the May 2017 Atlantic article by Oliver Bateman? - The Young Academic's Twitter Conundrum.
That article does a good job in exploring the benefits and risks of academic social media presence.
What is clear is that, when done well and handled carefully, a large social media presence can be beneficial to academics. The benefits to alternative academics of investing in social media may be even great than for traditional academics.
Alt-acs, after all, tend to have careers where advancement is related more to impact than research productivity. Being connected to a large network of peers via social media may be more beneficial to an alternative academic than a publication in a peer reviewed journal. (We should unpack this hypothesis).
Without clear career advancement milestones such as tenure and promotion, an alternative academic may be tempted to use purchased Twitter followers as a signifier of impact.
To be clear, I don’t know of any cases of alt-acs buying Twitter followers. I’m just saying that there may be some structural career incentives at work that would tempt an alt-ac to do so.
Do you see any correlation between number of Twitter followers and alt-ac career success?
Which way would the causal arrow point?
Did you find this post through my @joshmkim Twitter feed? (Read shameless half-disguised effort to attract more Twitter followers).
What has been the impact of Twitter on your career?
How many Twitter followers do you have?
