With lots of movement in the social media landscape, this post gives you an overview of the ways RePEc can help you on social media, at least when you intend to use it for professional purposes.
Finding economists on social media and being found
If you want to use social media for professional purposes, the first problem you face is to find other economists to follow or communicate with. For two networks, Twitter and Mastodon, RePEc offers help.
Twitter: The listing of economists on Twitter has over name 2000 names, organized by fields, locations, and more. Each has an associated Twitter list, meaning that you just need to follow the Twitter list and you automatically follow a timeline with all its members. Instructions are also provided on how to get listed.
Mastodon:: Given the decentralized nature, it is more challenging to find people to follow, especially if they are located on another Mastodon instance. RePEc can help with a recently created listing of economists on Mastodon, again organized by fields, locations, and more. An additional benefit of being on that list is that the link to the IDEAS author profile on the Mastodon profile can be verified, thereby providing an identity verification.
Linking to economic research on social media
If you are discussing economic research on social media, we want to encourage you to link to an IDEAS page instead of directly to the paper of interest. Here are the advantages:
- On many social media platforms, this will automatically create a so-called card, that is, a preview of what is in the link. IDEAS, for example, will display the title along with an image containing title, author and abstract. This known to work on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Mastodon, Slack, WhatsApp and Telegram.
- Not everyone may have access to the paper. RePEc sites often offer alternative versions.
- RePEc URLs are permanent. Full-text URLs may move or disappear.
- RePEc pages offer more context (links to author profiles, citations, references, and more
- For blogs, the blog post is then listed on EconAcademics as well as on the IDEAS citation tab of the mentioned paper.
- Authors get credited for the traffic.
Finding new economic research on social media
RePEc offers also the option to follow new economic research on social media. At this point this is only available for Mastodon, with separate Mastodon accounts to follow in close to 100 economic fields. The NEP homepage has links to them. A similar initiative gathered 20,000 followers on Twitter until the platform banned these accounts, unfortunately.
Posted by Christian Zimmermann 
The RePEc Blog 