Thread by @dsquintana

You should use a Twitter thread to announce new papers instead of a blog post.

Here’s why...

In my personal experience, papers that are summarized in threads get more reads than blog post equivalents. I’m talking like 10x more reads, at least. I think there are a few reasons for this...

As there’s less friction with reading a thread (you don’t need to leave Twitter to read it, unlike a blog), people more likely to read the thread about your paper.

Different tweets within a thread appeal to different people. You never know which tweet will resonate with folks (who will share that particular tweet). Your title tweet might not be appealing to audience X, but tweet #6 might be. Think of it like A/B testing.

It’s *really* hard summarizing a paper into a single tweet, even if you’re linking to a blog post. Threads give you the space to walk through your paper, like a story

Threads are generally much shorter than blog posts, so people are more likely to read them because they have the expectation that they will be short. Sometimes people will like a tweet announcing a blog post to read it later, but how many *actually* return to read the post?

Blogs tend to be more serious. We already have papers for that, so threads provide a fun alternative.

It takes less time to write a thread than a blog post on your new paper. I’m on part-time paternity leave at the moment*, so saving time means EVERYTHING to me right now

* I wrote this thread during sections of two nap times 👨‍👧

You can add as many images as you like in blog posts, but if you add too many the post can look busy. Threads are much better suited for adding images.

And GIFs, of course.

Here are a few tips for improving your paper threads...

If you’re looking for great (and FREE) images to illustrate your thread’s tweets, have a look at @unsplash

To increase the chances that people will share more individual tweets from your threads, write each tweet so that it can stand together on its own

Using the draft function in the twitter app is a HUGE help for writing threads. There’s a 20 tweet limit for draft threads, which is a good limit, but you can always add more to your published thread if you like

Sure, tweets are ephemeral-like (but the search function on twitter.com is actually pretty good for ringing old tweets), but if you *really* want something more permanent, you can use @threadreaderapp to unroll your thread into link, which can be shared like a blog

I’m not trying to dunk on blogs here, they can be useful for unpublished ideas and for posts on methods. But when it comes to sharing new research, threads are the way to go (unless you have *already* have a big blog audience). You can always do both, if you want

We all want our work to be read, that’s why were scientists. Whether you like it or not, many scholars are paying attention to twitter at the moment, instead of RSS feeds, article alerts, and papers themselves

https://twitter.com/urofio/status/1106934630652039168?s=21