For the extremely boring data, read on.
These days, it’s common, though far from universal, for academic ecologists to use social media. Often to publicize their own research, for professional networking, for public outreach, and for other professional tasks such as finding new papers to read. Some academic ecologists use social media for other purposes too, both serious and not. For instance, speaking out on political issues, or joking around with friends.
If you’re on the North American ecology faculty job market, you might wonder what effect your social media presence will have on your chances of landing a tenure-track faculty position. Ok, I lied, I’m guessing you don’t wonder that. I’m guessing that literally nobody out there actually thinks that anybody’s social media presence, or lack thereof, has any effect whatsoever on their odds of landing a tenure-track faculty position in ecology. But I was bored and procrastinating a few months ago, so I compiled a bit of data on the social media profiles of recently hired tenure-track ecology profs in North America. And now I’m posting those data, because for various reasons Meghan, Brian, and I all lack the time to write good posts at the moment.
In mid-February, I went back to my nearly comprehensive list of everyone hired as a tenure-track asst. professor in ecology or an allied field (e.g., fish & wildlife, conservation, etc.) in the US or Canada during the 2021-22 job season. That was 159 people. I googled to see if they have Twitter/X accounts, and if so, how many followers they have.
I looked for Twitter/X accounts rather than Mastodon, Bluesky, Linkedin, Facebook, Instagram, etc., because back in 2021-22, Twitter was the center of the social media universe for academia. Obviously, it’s possible–even likely–that some people hired in 2021-22 have since deleted their Twitter accounts, or stopped using them actively. It’s also possible–even likely–that some other people now have appreciably more Twitter followers than they did back in 2021-22. (And I suppose it’s possible that some of them only started using Twitter after they were hired as tenure-track faculty, though that seems unlikely to me.) But despite many academics leaving Twitter over the last couple of years, Twitter is still among the leading platforms for academics who want to have a professional social media presence. So I do think these data are adequate for addressing some basic questions. Like “Do you have to have a social media presence to land a tenure-track faculty position in ecology?”, “Do you have to have a social media presence to land a tenure-track faculty position in ecology at an R1 university?”, and “What kind of social media presence does a typical recently-hired North American ecology asst. prof have?”
Here’s what I found:
Most (but far from all) recently-hired tenure-track asst. professors of ecology have Twitter accounts. Specifically, 110/159 (69%) have Twitter accounts. For reasons described above, that’s likely an underestimate of how many had Twitter accounts at the time back when they were hired in 2021-22. But I doubt that the other 31% all had Twitter accounts back in 2021-22. In all likelihood, a minority–possibly a sizeable minority–of recently hired tenure-track ecology profs have never had Twitter accounts. And I assume at least some of them have never had Bluesky or Mastodon accounts either, though I didn’t check.
As an aside, 69% is higher than I expected. In retrospect, I was overgeneralizing from old data showing that only a minority of academic scientists are on Twitter. Recently-hired ecology profs are a non-random subset of all academic scientists. I assume (but don’t know for sure) that junior faculty are much more likely to use Twitter/X than more senior faculty are.
R1 hires are a bit more likely to have Twitter accounts. 47/59 hires at R1 universities (80%) have Twitter accounts, vs. 63/100 (63%) for hires at non-R1 institutions. (Note: “R1” here includes Canadian universities that are the equivalent of US R1 universities, such as the University of Toronto). The sample size is big enough that this is likely a real difference rather than sampling error. Note that I only classified hiring institutions into “R1” and “not R1”; a finer-grained classification might reveal some nuances. In any case, don’t overinterpret this result. In particular, I highly doubt this result arose because search committees at R1 universities are especially keen to hire applicants with a social media presence! I mean, just anecdotally, I’ve sat on several search committees at my own Canadian-equivalent-of-an-R1 university, including recently. At no point has anyone on any of those search committees ever brought up any applicant’s social media presence or lack thereof. Rather, I suspect what’s going on here is that ecologists with Twitter accounts mostly use them to tweet about their own research, and for research-related professional networking. Certainly, the vast majority of tweets I saw in my casual glances at these Twitter accounts were broadly research-related. As opposed to tweets about, say, pedagogy or politics or whatever. So I think what’s going on here is that having a Twitter account is correlated with being an active researcher, and being an active researcher is correlated with getting hired at an R1 institution as opposed to a non-R1. With the result that having a Twitter account also is correlated with getting hired at an R1 institution as opposed to a non-R1. (Although note that it’s not a perfect correlation: even among R1 hires, there’s a not-trivially-small minority who don’t have Twitter accounts.)
The typical recent hire with a Twitter account only has a few hundred followers. For the new hires with Twitter accounts, the mean number of followers is 835. But it’s a right-skewed distribution, so the median (553 followers) is a better measure of the typical value. The middle 50% ranges from 278-943 followers. The full range is 7-10,100 followers.
Those are mostly pretty low numbers. They’re the low numbers you’d expect if new faculty hires are using their Twitter accounts primarily for research-related purposes and professional networking. Rather than to, say, build some “personal brand” outside the narrow confines of their own academic subfield, reach members of the general public, or influence public policy or politics. For context, the Ecological Society of America‘s Twitter account has 3,465 followers. Longtime ecology/academia blogger Stephen Heard has 10,400 Twitter followers. Our own Meghan Duffy had something like 12,000 followers back when she used to use Twitter a few years ago. Former ESA President and NOAA Director Jane Lubchenco has 14,800 Twitter followers. Famous evolutionary biologist Rich Lenski has 15,800. Fisheries ecologist Trevor Branch, first author of, and participant in, a recent experimental study relating tweets to citations, has 17,700. Journal of Ecology has 34,100. Nature Ecology & Evolution has 43,800. If you start looking at people and institutions with a public profile outside of ecology or academia, you find much higher numbers. Paleoecologist, podcaster, and activist Jacquelyn Gill has 104,000 Twitter followers. Science cartoonist Zach Weinersmith has 108,000. Climate scientist, author, and activist Michael Mann has 222,000. The BBC Earth account has 831,000. Richard Dawkins has 3 million. Bill Nye the Science Guy has 5.7 million. Michelle Obama has 22 million. Oprah Winfrey has 42 million. The point is, hardly any recently hired tenure-track ecology profs are “Twitter famous” even within the very small pond of academic ecology. Not even for quite modest “Stephen Heard” levels of Twitter fame. 🙂 Literally none are “Twitter famous” outside of academic ecology.
Discussion
I’ve written previously about how recently-hired tenure-track asst. profs of ecology vary a lot on various measurable dimensions, such as their publication rates, Google Scholar h-indices, and where they got their degrees. But when it comes to social media presence, they actually don’t vary much at all. With rare exceptions, they either use Twitter mostly to tweet about their own research (and have the low follower counts to prove it), or else they don’t use Twitter at all. And although I don’t have data on the social media presences of as-yet-unsuccessful ecology faculty job seekers, I highly doubt that such data would look any different.
I’ll conclude with some advice that I suspect is so obvious and well-known that literally nobody needs it. If you’re an ecology faculty job seeker who’s not on Twitter/X, don’t feel like you “have” to get on Twitter/X (or other social media) “because everybody else is.” Everybody else isn’t. By all means get on Twitter if you have some independent reason for wanting to do so, of course. And if you’re an ecology faculty job seeker who’s already on Twitter, and worried about what search committees will think of your Twitter use, you almost certainly don’t need to worry. If you’re like just almost every Twitter-using recent tenure-track hire in ecology, you’re mostly using Twitter for common, innocuous purposes, like tweeting about your own research to other researchers in your own subfield. No faculty search committee is going to care at all that you do that.
I assume this extremely boring post doesn’t come as news to any of you, right?