The power of social media lies in its interactivity and its strength to amplify the reach of content. At the same time this has the potential to quickly turn into a pitfall. It is therefore essential to be aware of basic rules for using social media. Some of these are included in the rules of ‘netiquette’ and general professional conducts of behaviour. Others depend on the type of content posted and revolve around copyright, intellectual property or confidentiality issues.
With the changes in traditional academic publishing, a major development and yet still a considerable challenge is to identify the impact of scientific content beyond established measures such as citation counts or journal impact factors. ‘Altmetrics’ aim to capture the online activity around a scientific publication by tracking metrics such as downloads, number of readers or amplification and discussion in social networks [10,11]. Researchers can assess their online impact by using professional applications such as Altmetric Explorer [12], Impact Story [13] or a range of other tools [14]. A quick way to get a feel for the online reach of a scientific publication is to pay attention to the article’s altmetrics which are increasingly displayed on journal websites, or to track the reach of a link or hashtag using special social search engines like Topsy