R-Ladies Twitter takeover

Published: 7 October 2019

Anna Henschel on social media and public engagement

 

 

At the end of September, I took over the @WeAreRLadies rotating curator account for one week. Rotating curator (RoCur) accounts are extremely popular among the scientific (and non-scientific) Twitter community and exist for a variety of topics.

For example, one of the biggest ones (@realscientists, 82.5K followers) showcases writers, communicators, artists, clinicians and researchers, giving especially smaller Twitter accounts the opportunity to talk to a large audience about their area of expertise.

The ‘We are R Ladies’ account, like the name suggests, highlights members of the ‘RLadies’ community, which is a worldwide organization that aims to improve gender diversity among users of the R programming language by facilitating local chapter meetups (there are many in the UK, the closest one located in Edinburgh) and connecting members globally through the Twitterverse.

While it can feel daunting to take over such a large account, most accounts of the RoCur variety have explicit guidelines on what they would like their curators to cover and there are helpful moderators working behind the scenes to support you throughout your curation (this often involves some email communication beforehand, using Slack to solve problems on the go and signposting the guidelines).

Before taking over the ‘We are R Ladies’ account, I thought about what I want to get across in this one week, how I would want to engage this audience and which little ‘R hacks’ I thought were worth sharing with the community. Based on previous RoCur experiences, I started with some fun ‘icebreaker’ activities, like challenging the community to describe themselves and what they use R for only with three emojis. Following the basic introductions on the first day, I retweeted people who were looking for R advice and news from local chapters. The following days I picked R topics close to my heart: my research and how I use R to wrangle and analyse data, the freely available #PsyTeachR resources and the R workshop that I had organised with a team of postgraduate students earlier this year.

Curating a large Twitter account can be a nice introduction to public engagement – you will be engaging with an audience that is likely already very interested in the topic you are passionate about (trolls are indeed few and far between).

It can also help you develop a digital presence and facilitate networking with like-minded people (a big plus of course is communicating your research to a broad audience). In addition to sharing your own resources and advice, often you will come across helpful tips by other followers of the RoCur account and you can take advantage of the ‘hive mind’ to solve either your own or other community members’ questions. Another implicit benefit is the social media skills training you pick up along the way. While most big RoCur accounts operate differently, it is generally recommended to take advantage of Twitter management apps such as Tweetdeck or Hootsuite. They allow you to keep tabs on several Twitter accounts at once and you can take advantage of the extremely handy tweet-scheduling features.

 

 


First published: 7 October 2019