ellipticalpointofview

I wanted to give some perspective to the amounts of profiles retrieved in my post on finding researchers by searching the bio on their Twitter Profile. If you run a similar search on LinkedIn, where you’re searching the profiles of LinkedIn members’, there are significant differences in the counts of profiles received (see table of results, below).

Counts of Profiles retrieved across platforms

For Followerwonk and LinkedIn, I’ve broken this down into all profiles and those with an Australian location for a comparison:

Notes about searching on LinkedIn:

• You can “search strings” and use search operators (+,-)
• If you follow the links, you may need to log in to LinkedIn to see each search result (I found this when I was checking them)

Is there a conclusion to be drawn from this?

The differences are quite significant but there are a couple of things to consider with this:

• Although I’m searching the same terms, the search on LinkedIn has more profile information to search (there are a number of profile fields) whereas Twitter only provides space for a 160 character bio (this is why it’s important to search Twitter by both bio and tweets, so you are covering all bases)
• Although there are more LinkedIn members, they are more likely to log in less often than Twitter members according to Pew Research Centres 2014 Social Media Update:

NB: Pew Research Center’s Social Media Updates are based on responses from  US participants.

• Twitter and LinkedIn have different demographic profiles for membership (Pew Research Centres 2014 Social Media Update):

NB: Pew Research Center’s Social Media Updates are based on responses from  US participants. NB: Pew Research Center’s Social Media Updates are based on responses from  US participants.

• While LinkedIn members are potentially less active, there are significantly more of them in certain disciplines. Plus:
  • It is still the number one platform for professionals by a clear mile, against all competitors
  • The number of active LinkedIn users in Australia overtook Twitter in May 2011, based on socialmedianew’s calculations: Social Media Statistics Australia, May 2011 and LinkedIn hasn’t looked back

The primary conclusions from this comparison should probably be:

• Twitter may not be the magic bullet for every researcher and research discipline
• Make Twitter part of your toolkit, but not your whole toolkit
• You should also be considering ways you can leverage content you are sharing on Twitter across both platforms. (And why stop there? consider how you can leverage content across all platforms you have a professional presence on: ResearchGate, Academia.edu and more.)
• In doing that, you do also need to consider how you will attribute outcomes to each of those platforms. How do you determine which platforms (or combinations of actions on platforms) are more likely to lead to the specific outcomes you want (e.g. connections with people in industry, downloads of your papers, views of presentations, citations and more)?

Photo in Header Image: © Johanna Goodyear | Dreamstime Stock Photos