Doing Economics

6.7 Social Media as Professional Service
Although it may seem strange at first blush to equate the use of social
media with professional service, there is a form of social media engagement
which can enhance your professional life. To differentiate that form of
social media engagement from the more common way in which social
media is used (i.e., to keep in touch with friends and family, or to follow
celebrities), I will refer to that form of social media engagement as
“professional social media engagement.”
Although there are horror stories of people allegedly being denied tenure
or promotion because of their social media engagement, two distinct facts
are worth noting about those stories. First and foremost, the most prominent
such story (Johnson 2005) is now over 15 years old, and academia’s view of
social media has changed substantially over the last decade. To paraphrase
some of the comments I have heard from senior colleagues—that is, those
colleagues who tend to be the most skeptical when it comes to social media
—over the years, those comments have gone from saying things like
“Social media is a waste of time; that time could have been used to write
more or better papers” to saying things like “I choose not engage with
social media, but I can certainly see its usefulness to academia.” Still, my
own endorsement of professional social media engagement should not be
misconstrued as “social media engagement will not harm your career at
all.” And indeed, when I talk of professional social media engagement, I
mean an intelligent use of social media in addition to a professional use of
it. How should you approach social media? By “professional social media
engagement,” what I mean is social media use that primarily aims at (i)
engaging with other scholars in one’s research area, field, discipline, and
adjacent disciplines, and to some (hopefully lesser) extent (ii) improving the
visibility of one’s own research.