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For many academic faculty and staff, online presence may be looked at as an afterthought, as something that doesn’t strongly affect one’s career trajectory. Yet a 2025 study in The Journal of Law and Empirical Analysis determined that “joining Twitter increases citation counts by an average of 22% per year and improves article placements by up to 10 ranks for law professors.” A strong online presence can strengthen one’s academic network, boost one’s scholarly profile, and improve one’s opportunities to present at conferences and publish. Furthermore, professors who discuss their work online can help spread knowledge to non-academic audiences.
Here are some of the most important considerations for academics who want to improve their online profile:
You already have a brand, whether you know it or not.
Is your website defunct? Have you not edited your academia.edu or LinkedIn profile in five years? Is your online presence a seldomly updated and confusing mix of personal and professional content? Whether you know it or not, you already have an online brand, and that brand is communicating to others how — and to what extent — you wish to engage with your discipline or with the public at large. Take a few minutes to audit your online presence and make sure it reflects who you are and how you want to be seen.
When possible, make your academic writing available online.
Often, journal or even book publishers will allow you to share your writing in full (or a sample chapter of a book), either immediately upon publication or after an embargo period. Making your writing and its bibliographic citation information available will increase its readership, its influence, and most likely its citations. Academia.edu or a personal website can both be good places to share one’s writing. You can even create a profile on Google Scholar to share open access to your writing.
Use an online profile to show engagement with your discipline.
Whether you are applying to present at a conference or interviewing for tenure-track jobs, an up-to-date online profile, ideally through a personal website, but also on sites like academia.edu and Knowledge Commons, can demonstrate your active engagement in teaching and learning. A helpful way to design your own website is to look at 5-10 websites of people who are highly respected in your discipline. A brief “news” section or a blog can help you and your readers to keep track of your scholarly work, but if you don’t have the ability to update such a section frequently, it may be best to omit it. Wix, Squarespace, and WordPress are all code-free options that you can use to build a website using your own domain name.
Find and join your scholarly conversation.
If your main aim with your online presence is interacting with other scholars in your discipline, then it obviously makes sense to go to where those conversations are happening online. Do a small survey of some of the most high-profile scholars in your discipline, and find out where they are having conversations online, whether it is Bluesky, LinkedIn, or specific scholarly forums. Generally, it is a good idea to spend some time on a platform, posting content and engaging in conversations, before you follow others, as then the people you follow are more likely to see the value in your content and follow you back. Andy Tattersall, a consultant who helps academics communicate to the public about their research, states that “One of the most common mistakes [academics make is] building networks that do not work for them, [and] connecting with people out of politeness, when they should focus on connecting with those who share the same interests. Ideally, they need to follow academics, professionals, and [organizations] that regularly share beneficial information.”
Know your career “season,” and engage accordingly.
If it is your first year in a tenure-track job, you may want to allocate most of your time and energy to attending in-person events and getting to know the politics of your department and institution. Therefore, during such a transitional period, you may want to limit your time online.
On the other hand, if you are a tenured professor engaged in research that is of great interest to the public, and you are publishing a book, then you may want to be posting some academic ideas and commentary on sites like X (formerly Twitter) that have high numbers of non-academic users.
Part of knowing your career season is also knowing what kinds of conversations you are not comfortable participating in. If, for example, you are a contingent faculty member, the unfortunate reality is that you may want to avoid “going off” on highly-charged political topics in public forums. Tattersall states that “X/Twitter has been a place where this problem has thrived, understandably putting off many academics from using social media. Alternatives exist, such as the relatively new Bluesky, and the academic community has increasingly used LinkedIn. It is very hard to get away from politics right now, especially since much of the conversation revolves around issues in which academics are actively engaged, such as climate change and public health. Academics need to decide what they want to achieve with any online conversation and whether it might negatively affect their career and well-being.”
Separating the personal from the professional.
How much separation do you think is necessary between your personal and professional life? How will you protect this separation? If you have a very or even slightly Google-able name, then you may want to create private personal profiles with usernames that are totally different from your regular name. Sometimes the crossover between the personal and the professional can lead to unintended consequences for faculty members. For example, a faculty member might use their personal YouTube account to create and post course content. However, that same account can also reveal more than intended, from liked videos and playlists to unexpected recommendations that appear while navigating or projecting in class. Or, if you use the same “clever” username that is on your academic social media profile to comment on blogs, people searching for you might come across your opinion on the latest celebrity gossip item.
Build a consistent voice and brand.
To gain followers, trust, and influence, it is important that you be consistent with what you offer online. Are you able to provide insight into trends in your discipline? Are you able to post and summarize recent groundbreaking studies? Are you aiming to speak both to academics and the public at large? Whatever your brand or voice is, be consistent, both in terms of how often you post and in the quality and voice of your content. If you intend to bring your work to the public, and/or to academics outside of your discipline, then you need to depart a bit from “technical jargon speak” and translate your results into “plain English,” Tattersall advises.
Being a public intellectual is admirable, but keep your eye on your end goal.
There are many amazing examples of academics, most of whom have tenure, who post a considerable amount of content that is aimed at wide public audiences. One of the most well-known public intellectuals is Neil de Grasse Tyson, whose YouTube videos rack up millions of views in a week. Dr. Tyson is beyond tenure, and so he can afford to devote much of his time to creating open-access social media content. Similarly, Dr. Heather Cox Richardson, who is tenured, can afford the time and academic freedom to write daily notes on a Substack that is very politically charged. For tenure-track, non-tenure-track, and adjunct faculty, the calculus of how much time to devote to online presence is often a lot more delicate. Adjunct instructors, in particular, may be balancing positions at multiple institutions with limited institutional support, making sustained public engagement difficult. Ideally, for these faculty, online presence complements and highlights their scholarly work.
Conclusion
Building an online scholarly network can bring unexpected dividends; your contacts might think of you when they or someone they know is assembling a book or putting together a conference panel. Perhaps the scholars you interact with can become real-life friends and collaborators or even write you an “outside faculty” letter when you are being considered for promotion or applying for a grant. Tattersall notes that “Being online…is very much about playing a longer game” of connecting with “potential collaborators” and “[mobilizing] one’s research…so that policymakers and the media are aware of it.” Having the capacity to communicate the value of one’s scholarship in a public-facing way, Tattersall suggests, is increasingly important to secure governmental and non-governmental funding. All things considered, a consistent and strong brand is not just desirable but necessary to fully engage in scholarly conversation and share the impact of your work with non-academic publics.
