Traditional social media still play a significant role in scholarly communications, particularly for scholars interested in reaching an audience outside of their immediate scholarly community. This looks at the propensity of scholars to post to LinkedIn & Twitter and is based on data from a survey of 731 higher education faculty randomly chosen from nearly 500 colleges and universities in the USA. Data is broken out by personal variables such as work title, gender, personal income level, academic discipline, age and other variables, as well as institutional indicators such as college or university type or Carnegie class, enrollment size, public or private status and others.
Just a few of this 34-page report’s findings are that:
By academic title, deans and department chair are by far the most prolific users of Twitter and LinkedIn
Faculty in engineering and the hard sciences are more enthusiastic users than those in the arts or humanities.