Guide for creating and running an online community
One of the most effective mechanisms in assisting researchers with their careers within or outside academia would be by creating a community of researchers using online social media platforms. This online community will facilitate further career development support to this alumni, and to researchers in general, within or outside the academia.
This guide shares practical information about the process and lessons learned through the experience of preparing and managing the LinkedIn showcase page Researchers Beyond Academia by EURAXESS- A journey towards research careers outside universities, an EURAXESS on-line alumni community around intersectoral mobility of researchers.
We decided that launching a Showcase LinkedIn Page was the best approach for our project as it would allow us to take advantage of the main EURAXESS Page reach and impact. For that, we sought permissions from the Page Administrator to launch our sub-showcase page. EURAXESS Ireland/IUA received the full admin rights for the showcase website together with a representation of the FECYT/Spain, the Work Package leaders. By doing this, it gave our Page visibility on the main Page as an affiliated Page.
EURAXESS LinkedIn is a social network which attracts academics, graduates, and professionals. Along with being able to search for people working in specific sectors, it is a great platform for professional engagement and interaction. The database within LinkedIn uses Boolean Search, which means that you can filter who you want to connect with based on sector, job title, connections, and employer. LinkedIn is therefore an ideal platform for the EURAXESS centres.
Our predominant aim was to target researchers and engage them with a high-quality interesting content related to research careers beyond academia.
Nevertheless, it is common knowledge that academia and industry/business coexist and the lines between the two worlds have become increasingly blurred over the last couple of decades. Therefore, we finally also published relevant content connected to interesting academic initiatives supporting those who are still in academia and possibly plan to stay there.
The content published on the platform was to inspire PhD holders, Post Docs, academics, and other academia related minds who want to progress outside academia to start thinking of organisations and institutions linked to their specific or broader subject areas that have a significant research function, or that work with communicating research to the public and other audiences.
It is important to understand what the metrics that LinkedIn offer and that can be used as indicators to set up and monitor your goals. We provide our goals and impact indicators to provide a real case example:
We began with 0 followers on our page and despite setting a goal of 300 researchers followers we exceeded this figure with over 1,500 followers.
Engagement signals actions taken by your followers and other LinkedIn users on our Showcase Page i.e., reactions, comments, shares, link clicks, poll responses. Engagement rate quantifies the percentage of followers of that engaged with the Showcase Page during a 28-day period. In total there were 841 reactions, comments and shares.
The average engagement rate on a post on LinkedIn is 0.35% and we are matching this benchmark metric on our Showcase Page. (Source: Social Insider).
Over the lifetime of this project we published 176 posts on LinkedIn.
It is clear that LinkedIn for a manager should consider not only the brand personality of posts but also the number of published posts per week. The LinkedIn algorithm seems to reward entities that post more often than those posting sporadically. The weekly number of posts positively influences the number of impressions, likes, clicks, shares, and comments. Thus, frequency matters. We posted six posts per week, almost one post per day and delivered consistency on our Showcase Page to keep our audience engaged.
Our consistency of posting resulted in an average daily reach of 35,765 which is significant, but it is also significant because we are reaching a relevant audience by virtue of being linked to the main EURAXESS LinkedIn Company Page.
Our content is diverse with a mix of text, links and visuals which proved to work well.
You can connect your LinkedIn website to the EURAXESS LinkedIn Company Page. This would maximise the number of your followers and would and would ensure the integrity of the EURAXESS alumni community.
Ensure the Admin of the Showcase Page or your new, independent LinkedIn website gets familiarised with the options and processes offered by LinkedIn. Facilitate training to the person in charge of the page.
Creating a LinkedIn forum for EURAXESS alumni for your specific EURAXESS community would be a huge advantage. Your alumni community will differ from country to country and region to region. It would be determined by most common services your EURAXESS centre is focused on. Your LinkedIn platform would be dedicated to alumni you have assisted with careers/dual careers, accommodation, or immigration queries.
Example: Irish EURAXESS is managing the Hosting Agreement scheme on behalf of the Irish Ministry of Higher Education (DFHERIS). Therefore, the office has gathered a database of the alumni (researchers employed on Hosting Agreements in Ireland). This would be an ideal starting point for creating your LinkedIn alumni community. The first step would require designing a survey among your potential followers to ascertain their expectations (the content type they wish to see etc.).
It is important to leave a clear message of the the purspose and topic of the page
You should not be shy on spreading the line page
along with your own personal network of connections on LinkedIn
One of the innovative features of LinkedIn that we maximised during this project was the setting up of a Researchers Beyond Academic Newsletter. We published 6 editions of this newsletter based on the input of our WP colleagues (SAIA/FECYT/IUA) and gained 881 subscribers. When we issue a newsletter, it is sent to subscriber’s email inbox.
The LinkedIn page was enriched by connecting it with several Workshops and Cultural events for EURAXESS alumni – as a way for integration of a virtual LinkedIn community in the real world:
- A cultural Integration event – How to Cooperate Internationally in a Lab?
- EURAXESS chat before a cultural event (classical music concert) in the National Botanic Gardens in Dublin, Ireland on 18th June 2022
- Post regularly. In the case of the Researchers Beyond Academia by EURAXESS showcase page, posting at least three times per week worked well.
- Engage with your community, by responding to and liking comment.
- Review your insights on a monthly basis to understand what content is performing best.
- Share visual content along with links and videos.
- Tag organisations (@mention) and individuals were relevant.
- Use 5-6 hashtags in each post.
- Integrating your LinkedIn into the real EURAXESS community world. Building a network of your LinkedIn followers in virtual reality would have several advantages for both alumni themselves and your EURAXESS centre. This would result in any follow up events and actions, promotion activities (ref to poin ‘I’ Workshops and Cultural events for EURAXESS alumni )
DON’T:
- Don’t be active on LinkedIn without the proper training
- Don’t ignore your audience and simply ‘post and go’, be sure to engage with them
- Don’t have long absences of not posting
- Don’t just post any content, it has to be relevant to your target audience
DO:
- Do create relevant and engaging content
- Do leverage your own personal LinkedIn network to promote your Showcase Page
- Do post at least three times per week
- Do experiment with different LinkedIn features
While we have succeeded in our LinkedIn campaign, there are barriers to success that we identified during this project as follows:
- Lack of knowledge and/or skills about LinkedIn
- Lack of consistency of posting
- Posting content that is not relevant and doesn’t resonate with your audience
When you create and run a LinkedIN showcase page, please consider these important aspects:
- Resourcing in terms of locking-down time in your working week
- Upskilling team members
- Publish content regularly
- Be creative and innovative