If you drunk on the “kool-aid” of “Twitter for academia”, by all means, yes. However, I have long held that getting work done is more important than “tweeting”. I agree, it is a megaphone. Everyone and anyone seems to have a Twitter presence. A visit from someone outside the institution becomes a Tweet where everyone self congratulates. I get it. It is the flavour of the season.

But remember this. Twitter is a time suck. It leaves you without a downtime to “think” and negative political news becomes more appealing. The tweets lack coherence and contexts, which makes it difficult for the users/readers to grasp nuances difficult to squeeze through.

If you are a young student, you can go hang out in senior scientists’ mentions on Twitter and be a reply guy, and if you’re smart and thoughtful and have insightful things to say, you’ll get noticed! Twitter is especially empowering for a particular kind of person who’s unique and might stand out weirdly, and in normal settings that uniqueness would be a problem – but on the internet, it’s an incredible asset. 

Science is full of those kinds of people. They’re the ones who do the best science! But the journal / postdoc / brand building regressive tax hits those people especially hard, because it’s a game they probably don’t play very well. The structure of academic science today is leveraged on there being no way around that positional scarcity. But Twitter is a way around.

Can Twitter Save Science? – alexdanco.com