Visibility or Impact? What is Social Media’s Role for Academics?

It’s been over six months since I deleted my Twitter account, and I have thoughts…

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I deleted my Twitter account earlier this year in the height of the Twitter universe drama. To be honest, I never really loved the platform, mainly because I don’t love social media in general. However, I was on Twitter because I was trying to further the impact of my research - a reason I think would align with most academics. Despite Twitter not being the only social media platform I use for sharing my work - I am also active on LinkedIn and Instagram - when I deleted my account, I did worry that my absence from this platform would affect the impact of my work. It’s been over six months since I deleted my account and if I’m honest, it’s not so much the impact, or lack thereof, that has occupied my thoughts, rather it’s had me pondering the difference between impact and visibility.

Social media is not something I naturally gravitate towards and it does take effort and a lot of planning for me to be as active on social media as I am. The reason I continue to put in that time and effort is because I have seen a return on it. My research is more well known and I’ve been given opportunities I may not have gotten otherwise. What I still am struggling to determine is whether or not this return is a result of impact or just increased visibility.

Academic impact is a contribution that advances or progresses research within a discipline. The original purpose of academic institutions was the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. But in today’s society, with tight budgets and changing government priorities that influence what research does and doesn’t get funded, this purpose seems to have faded somewhat. 

Academics are constantly encouraged to improve the impact of our work, but what exactly is impact in today’s academic climate? Is it the number of citations of your published research? Is it the amount of research funding your name and research profile can bring in? Is it the number of talks and presentations you give about your work? Is it the number of students you’re able to attract to the courses you teach? Is it the number of boards/committees/working groups etc. that you’re on?

Most academics build their career around niche areas of research and the communities and audiences they cultivate tend to orbit around that same niche. Social media provides a platform that allows academics to increase the visibility of their work. It also creates opportunities for reaching a larger and more diverse audience. I know from myself that social media has given me more opportunities to connect with people from a multitude of disciplines different to my own.

Some of those connections have resulted in research collaborations and that’s something that I would classify as impact. But I’ll note here that these research collaborations came from me pursuing a collaboration through a contact I met through social media. Social media was the initial catalyst but it took initiative on my end to turn that connection into something impactful for my research.

What social media has done for me is increase the visibility of my work, opening a floodgate of “opportunities” that have since come my way. I put the word opportunities in quotations for a few reasons. 

Firstly, a lot of the times the “opportunities” that come through are essentially a request for free labour. Regardless of what the opportunity may look like on paper, i.e. a resume, the end result is my time - outside of my day job - being put towards something. The additional workload that comes from these “opportunities” is exhausting to maintain, especially as an academic who is already inundated with work. 

Secondly, these “opportunities” can often detract from the main goal or purpose of your work. This isn’t always a bad thing because any career can benefit from diversity, but it can be hard to remember what you’re working towards when you try and squeeze in everything and anything. Very early on in my social media journey I made a habit of saying no to things that weren’t aligned with the goals and objectives of my work.

Thirdly, social media has an instantaneous nature, with trends or topics dying almost as quickly as they emerged. This means that many of the “opportunities” that come through often feel like people racing to catch the biggest wave of the moment with little thought to longevity.

This brings me to the biggest struggle I have with social media, particularly when thinking about impact. Content on social media is endless. Everyone is posting or sharing all the time and the sheer quantity of content is overwhelming. A lot of that content can feel much the same because people - myself included - post the same things on all of their different platforms. And it’s often the provocative or controversial things that gain traction for a short time until people latch on to the next thing. 

Impact has longevity, and this is a trait that is missing from social media. Social media attracts topical content that exists in a short window and evaporates into the ether of someone’s feed, buried under random thoughts or pictures of food. When I scroll through any social media platform, I go from reading a short snippet about a car accident, to watching a video about cats, to reading a motivational quote, all within the span of 30 seconds. My mind barely has the time to sit and ponder new information before moving on to the next thing. I’m absorbing everything and nothing all at once.

The fleeting nature of social media means that even if a post about your work gains some traction - likes, comments, reshares, etc. - that traction only exists within a short epoch. There are ways to foster longevity from social media traction, but it takes work - on top of the work you have already put in. And that work exists outside of the social media bubble. 

I haven’t had a Twitter account for over six months and it has not affected the impact of my research. I now just have one less platform to scroll through. For academics who have joined the Twitter migration and are worried about what the absence of Twitter may do to the impact of their work, know that impact and visibility are not the same. 

Social media has made my work more visible and this has had positive benefits. But I would argue that social media has not increased the impact of my work. I have to put in a lot of time and energy into advancing the impact of my research - conferences, presentations, workshops, research papers, etc. The time and effort I put into social media is added on top of this workload, and honestly, it serves a different purpose for me.

My reasons for choosing to be active on social media are very personal - I wasn’t seeing women who looked like me and had names like mine represented in the academic bubbles of social media. I wanted to fill that gap. From that perspective, I would say social media has created impact, but on a personal level. I think this is the key thing with social media: it is a personal journey. 

Having an online presence - in any form - can be beneficial to an academic career. With more changes coming to Twitter - I refuse to call it X because honestly I think it’s stupid - I foresee more academics leaving that platform. There are other platforms that are trying to fill the Twitter gap - Mastodon, Threads, etc. - and it’s easy to feel like you need to build a presence in every crevice of social media. But from my perspective I would encourage people to consider what purpose any social media platform is serving for them. I have two accounts - LinkedIn and Instagram - and managing those is time consuming. I simply don’t have the time or honestly the patience to add more platforms - and therefore more work - to my plate. I also care about the quality of the content I share, rather than the quantity. So regurgitating the same things across half a dozen different platforms can feel a bit redundant for me personally. 

I think the line between impact and visibility is still blurry, but I lean more towards the argument that social media is a platform for visibility not academic impact. You can still cultivate impact through social media, but I would argue that it is not academic impact. And my main argument for this is the absence of longevity that comes with the fleeting nature of social media. The instantaneity of social media and the longevity that impact requires are paradoxically opposed. In the grand scheme of things, the fall of Twitter is not going to crumble an academic career. It will just mean less visibility in a small pocket of the internet.