Amplification
It can be useful to use social media channels to share and disseminate your blog, and ensure that your posts reach a wide range of readers. This is known as amplification. You can share your blog posts through sites like Mastodon, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This can be a good way to engage people with your blog and generate discussion. You can share individual posts, and you can also add a link to your blog on your profile page.
Blogged: OER18 – Listening to the voices https://t.co/tsSdOXcTsc Reflections on #OER18.
— Lorna M. Campbell (@LornaMCampbell) April 20, 2018
However it’s important not to get too caught up with social media engagement. Remember that online attention can be fickle; engagement is no indication of quality and vice versa. A good rule of thumb is to write for yourself first and foremost.
Digital Safety
Although using social media can be a great way to amplify and disseminate your blog posts, it’s important to be aware that social media can be a hostile environment, particularly for women, people of colour and marginalised groups, who may experience targeted harassment. You should never feel obliged to engage with social media, particularly if you feel unsafe or attacked. Your online safety is of paramount importance.
blogs.ed.ac.uk allows you to choose whether to make their blog posts available to the general public, to EASE authenticated users only, or to keep them completely private. It’s entirely up to you.
All users should exercise caution when disseminating potentially sensitive or controversial topics. A blog post that may not be controversial in an academic context could resulting in unwanted attention or abuse if it circulates widely in the public domain.
Further advice and guidance is available as follows:
- Digital Safety, Wellbeing and Citizenship, comprehensive guidance and resources from the University of Edinburgh to help keep you safe and secure while engaging online
- Managing Your Digital Footprint: Resources for Educators
- University of Edinburgh Social Media Guidelines
- getsafeonline.org: Online Abuse
Syndication
Syndication allows you to share your content with other blogs and also to pull in content from other blogs to your blog using RSS and Atom feeds. blogs.ed.ac.uk has a simple syndication plugin called FeedWordPress which can help you do this. This video shows you how you can use FeedWordPress to pull syndicated content into your blog.
As we mentioned earlier, all the content that appears on the University’s OER Service blog is syndicated from other sites.
(Playfair Architectural Drawings, CC BY, University of Edinburgh, https://edin.ac/2s7t8O3)