1. RGS-IBG Research Groups and Social Media James Cheshire UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis james.cheshire@ucl.ac.uk @spatialanalysis

2. About Me Lecturer at the UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA). Secretary GIScience Research Group Enjoy blogging for both spatial.ly and mappinglondon.co.uk. Twitter: @spatialanalysis and @maplondon

3. The Value of Social Media Promotion Interaction

4. General Principles Quality not quantity of followers important. @Maplondon has fewer than ½ the followers that @spatialanalysis has but I would argue is more influential. Not all your followers are real people. People who don’t follow you may still find content –Via Google or other users.

5. Why people will follow: Name You have two on Twitter: –I am James Cheshire and @spatialanalysis Need to be recognisable. RT @tgrg4: Check out our latest post on… Vs RT @transportgeography: Check out our latest post on… Or RT @TrnsptGeo: Check out our latest post on… Encourage people to click on your profile. –@Floating_Sheep is a group of geographers…you need to click on them to find out more.

6. Why people will follow: Affiliation/ Endorsement Not to be underestimated – there is a lot of junk out there so people are after credible people –RGS-IBG offers this. Tweets need to be on topic. Mentions from influential tweeters Who you follow/ are being followed by.

7. Why people will follow: Content Relevant –To your RG/ topic. No-one cares what you had for lunch! Original Consistent- regular postings Interpretable

8. Conventions #hashtags – used for topics/ themes. –Good for conferences. “Backchannel” –Naming rules apply –Also be consistent Retweets – RT @spatialanalysis Modified tweet- MT @spatialanalysis Hat Tip – HT @spatialanalysis Conversations - @spatialanalysis –Followers of both people see this in their feed, everyone can see them if clicking on profile. Good way of interacting/ including followers

9. Maintaining Interest

10. Aggregators- RSS Feeds http://blogs.casa.ucl.ac.uk/ http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/cas ahttp://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/cas a A great way to get content to your websites without having to write it. Can be from RG member’s blogs or elsewhere. Seek permission.

11. Tools: Tweetdeck

12. Final Thoughts Long term commitment Have a few people run the account. Encourage members to tweet your RG account. –You can then RT their work. Limit who you follow to key individuals.