LinkedIn for Academics

0.1 Why This Book Exists

I consider myself lucky to have experienced academic Twitter of the 2010s - I have long-standing research collaborations with people I met on Twitter, I owe my job at Glasgow to Twitter, and I even made a new best friend from Twitter. And then it collapsed into a hateful cesspit and academic social media fractured. Some academics migrated to Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads, but to everyone’s genuine surprise, many, including myself, have settled on LinkedIn.

In 2020, Daniel Quintana wrote Twitter for Scientists, a practical guide to using Twitter for academic networking and research dissemination. This book is a sequel of sorts, adapted for LinkedIn and updated for the current landscape. It is not a replacement and if you want comprehensive guidance on why academics should engage with social media at all, you should still read Dan’s original. This book assumes you have already decided that some form of professional social media presence might be useful and focuses on making LinkedIn work for you specifically.

0.2 Why LinkedIn?

LinkedIn is not Twitter and it never will be. The culture is different, the conventions are different, and the types of interactions it facilitates are different. But it offers a relatively stable, professionally-oriented platform where academics can share their work, build networks, and establish expertise.

This book covers LinkedIn basics, content strategy, and maintaining your wellbeing on the platform. It also includes material that Dan’s original did not emphasise, in particular, using LinkedIn to share teaching practice and open educational resources. Not because Twitter was bad for this, but because teaching-focused academics have historically been underserved by guidance on academic social media use and because I am a ride-or-die education-focused academic.

0.3 About me

I am a Professor of Evidence-Informed Education and Associate Dean for Learning and Teaching at the University of Glasgow. My research focuses on how students learn in blended and digital environments, with a particular emphasis on lecture capture and inclusive education. I live in Glasgow with my wife and like to climb mountains and read books.

You can find me on LinkedIn here.

0.4 Citation

Nordmann, E. (2026). LinkedIn for Academics [ebook edition]. Retrieved from https://emilynordmann.github.io/linkedin-for-academics. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18445332

0.5 Licence

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.

0.6 Acknowledgements

This book builds directly on Dan Quintana’s Twitter for Scientists (2020), which remains available at t4scientists.com. The structure and much of the underlying thinking comes from that work and I am grateful for the Creative Commons License allowing reuse.

Claude Opus 4.5 (Anthropic) was used heavily in the making of this book but I take full responsibility for the adaptation, errors, and any opinions expressed in it.