There are over 300 million Twitter accounts worldwide, including over 10 million accounts in the UK.

After a relatively slow initial uptake, Twitter has become increasingly popular with academics as well as students, policymakers, politicians and the general public. Many users struggled to understand what Twitter is and how they could use it, but it has now become the social media platform of choice for many.

The snappy nature of tweets means that Twitter is widely used by smartphone users who don’t want to read long content items on-screen.

What does Twitter enable you to do?

Twitter allows you to:

• easily promote your research, eg by providing links to your blog stories, journal articles and news items
• reach a large number of people quickly through tweets and retweets
• follow the work of other experts in your field
• build relationships with experts and other followers
• keep up-to-date with the latest news and developments, and share it with others instantly
• reach new audiences
• seek feedback about your work and give feedback to others
• follow and contribute to discussions on events, eg conferences that you can't get to in person
• express who you are as a person.