Please @ Me: Using Social Media to Promote IR Content

For many institutions, the brass ring is to upload as much into their institutional repository as possible. There are plenty of hoops to jump through to achieve this goal—copyright permissions, scanning, metadata, etc.—but the work doesn’t end once the item is posted. If scholarship is posted in an IR, but is never promoted, will it have any impact? Institutions and authors need to take a proactive approach to drive people to the IR. Social media—mainly Twitter—is an excellent tool to achieve that end but poses its own challenges. How should an institution choose what scholarship to share? How do you support faculty who want to share their scholarship, but are wary of social media? How do you build a network to amplify posts directing users to your IR? What happens when, in the process of promoting their work, faculty create new scholarship? While this session can’t provide all the answers, it will provide the foundation for an outreach strategy that can be tailored to different IRs and their institutions. After this session, attendees will be able to: Identify IR content that will translate well to social media; Articulate why their institution and faculty should use social media to promote scholarship in the IR; Develop support materials to encourage using social media; Locate other social media accounts that can amplify posts