6. Make a tweetstorm

Even shorter than most blog posts is the tweetstorm, where you describe your paper over a series of tweets, each a reply to the last (so they’re connected). My favorite tweetstorms use figures or tables from the paper to tell the story, like this one from Jayachandran on her work with Jack on payments for environmental conservation in Uganda. They’re a quick way to give Twitter readers your message. Why not just write a blog and link to it in a tweet? I believe that every time you ask someone to click a link, you lose readers. So if you can put the content right there, do it.

I occasionally do a playful tweetstorm of a paper, where each of the tweets has a humorous image or clip associated with it. Here’s one on how to measure patient satisfaction more effectively. I don’t expect these funny threads to convince a Ministry of Finance, but I believe they can catch the eye of the impatient scroller on twitter.