Feel Recognized: Dissemination is the way - Facebook Dissemination

Why

Many choices !! Then why prefer Facebook (A Social Network) website as a dissemination tool ?
Do we have a choice? Not really just take a look at the statistics and try to feel the reach and power of this platform:

1. Facebook has 955 million monthly active users at the end of June 2012^[1].
2. The average Facebook user visits four times a day ^[2].

And with this it overtakes the most visited website in U.S ^[2] (Google). So, it is time to represent your research on facebook. Let us have a detailed look on the available statistics of facebook ^[1]:

1. More than 955 million monthly active users.
2. More than 20 million people became fans of pages each day.
3. The average facebook user visits 4 times a day.
4. Average user is a member of 13 groups.
5. Average user spends more than 55 minutes per day on facebook.
6. More than 5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, albums, etc.) shared each week.
7. More than 3 million events created each month.
8. There are more than 100 million active users currently accessing facebook through their mobile devices. 

How

Is Facebook is just a social media tool ? NO, it can also be utilized for professional use such as dissemination of your research work. Keep on reading, to learn that how can we use this platform to distribute our research work to the target audience. You can share links, status updates, ask questions to get audience opinion and also share pictures related to your research. Indeed, you get a chance to collaborate with other like-minded researchers having similar research interests. Also, joining groups of your research expertise can also help you in planning your work and collaborating with other researchers.
How to proceed:

1. Give your profile a professional look and update your friends, followers and fans about your research and achievements.
2. Keep on sharing the links of other platforms where you are disseminating your research. Other platforms here can refer to twitter, personal websites, referencing websites, podcasts, monographs, your fan pages etc.
3. Try to interact with fellow researchers for collaboration, advice, surveys etc.
4. Adjust your security settings in such a way that your facebook profile so that author can get maximum info by simple search engine searches.
5. If you want you can make a separate fan page for your work as you can analyze the response to your research by knowing the age group, gender etc of the people reading your work.

Who

Researchers from mostly every domain ranging from mining to astronomy are using facebook according to their needs. So, trying this platform for your own domain would not be a bad choice. Moreover, if you do not find any group of your research domain then you can start a new one and can be a leader.

When

This is again a game of policies and legal issues, before disseminating check out the policies of the publisher where you are planning to publish your research paper or if you have published it, then have a look at the copyright agreement which you have signed with publisher.

Advantages

1. Your work can be showcased to thousands of active researchers of your domain.
2. You can cash it in the form of traffic on your web portal.
3. Helps in building network and finding collaborations.
4. Helps to get good ranks in search engines.

References

1. Facebook. (2010). Press room: Statistics. Retrieved September 29,2012 from http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=2
2. Lisa Küpper and Stephen D. Luke (n.d) “Special Issue | Guide to Using Facebook in Dissemination” Retrieved on 29 September 2012 from http://nichcy.org/dissemination/tools#facebook

Contributed By: Hasmeet Singh, Gursharan Singh