https://www.flickr.com/photos/franklintello/3816810879

Having your IR twitt with IFTTT

Marlène Delhaye
Aug 28, 2017 · 2 min read

Our institutional repository HAL AMU has been tweeting every fulltext document deposited in it since december 2015 : the idea is to promote our OA documents on an additional channel, which appears to be more and more invested by researchers.

As I haven’t seen much IRs on Twitter, I’ve thought I could share the procedure I followed with @HAL AMU :

First, create an account for the IR, preferably not too long to facilitate retweets

Then connect the RSS feed of the IR to Twitter via the magic IFTTT tool as follow :

  • Select the service that will trigger action : here RSS (for each new item added th the RSS feed)
  • Choose the sharing service : Twitter
  • Define the action : Post a new twitt
  • Precise what items should appear in the twitt (add ingredients) : {{EntryTitle}} — {{EntryUrl}}. You can add text, a hashtag for instance, but I don’t recommend it because of the 140 characters limit ; even if th system truncates the url, the title of the docuent has to remain visible.

@HAL_AMU only tweet fulltext documents : that’s what we want to promote ; of course you could do differently by changing the RSS feed.

The result is not very impressive so far : we have 100 followers after 18 months, which leaves room for improvement… The evolution of the number of followers and the interactions are progressing regularly though.

I’ve had the opportunity to talk with @strathclydeOA about their choices regarding their IR’ s twitting strategy. I’ve learned that they ended automatic tweeting after 18 months ; now they’re back to manual tweeting, which allows them to add relevant hashtags and get mote likes and RTs. The work is dispatched between the team, the twitts are written in bulk and scheduled weekly. Interesting to note that only the completely open documents are posted : no embargoed article is twitted.

We have a slightly different approach : we “push” all our documents on the network, leaving to the audience the choice to comment, like or RT them ; we couldn’t afford the time and human resources needed to do this selection andpromotion work for our weekly 100+ FT documents.

I’d love to know about your IR promotional strategies on social networks, feel free to comment !

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Marlène Delhaye

Written by

French OA & e-resources librarian at Aix Marseille Université http://t.co/rP6CQ2yPLM

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