Link: http://bit.ly/1FMz3Uc
Michael Risch over at the The Faculty Lounge takes a look at some survey data to see if it counters the commentary that "professors merely use twitter for self-promotion that does not promote any scholarly or legal interest." The data looks at 16000 tweets over 30 days by 500+ professors.
Some of the highlights:
"The chart shows that most users rarely tweet"
"more than 20% of the users had zero tweets during the month, which means that their usage was for consumption of tweets only"
"More than half of the 16000 tweets included a link to other material. To the extent that law professors are supposed to share knowledge with the world, this may imply that they are doing so more than half the time they tweet."
As there are thousands of law profs coming through Scholastica this submission season, I'd love to know how you share discipline-centric material and find the latest goings on in the discipline. Do you use social media, cruise the top papers on SSRN or something else? Regarding the sharing of content - do you share? Why or why not?
Personally, I tend to share a substantial number of links to content via Twitter as I'm reading articles around the web. When it comes to communities like Hacker News, I tend to check them daily as news sources but share content less often (primarily because by the time I find something worth sharing someone already has already shared it).