Part 4: getting to your goals

Once you have your audience pegged (at least sort of), what happens next? Well, it really depends on your overall goals. If your major goal is to monitor what's going on with a group (say, keeping track of the papers found interesting by people in your field), you don't need to go any further than this. Keep reading those tweets in good health!

However, if you need to engage your audience in order to take home the gold, more steps are needed. To have your audience pay attention to your messaging, the key is conversation (not monologue, which is generally unhelpful unless you are doing Shakespeare). What does conversation mean in a Twitter context? Most of the time, it means hashtags. Due to your eagle-eyed audience monitoring, you'll know what hashtags are in current use by your people (and hence what topics are on the top of their minds). Can you find a way to add to an ongoing conversation that is tied together by a hashtag? How can you bring up your science message within the context of that hashtag?