Twitter for academic purposes: An analysis of scholarly communication through conference tweets

Twitter has become a prominent social medium among academics of all disciplines. 1 In addition to postings about academic achievements, Twitter is frequently used at conferences to exchange knowledge or network within an academic community. Especially since, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many conferences had to be moved to an online setting, social media functioned as an alternative channel for real-life conference communication. To investigate the use of Twitter in the context of conferences from an applied linguistic perspective, I have conducted a genre analysis with a data set consisting of all tweets posted shortly before, during and after a small socialanthropology online conference. Multimodal content analysis and sentiment analysis were applied to the tweets to generate information about the communicative functions and the sentiments of conference tweets. The findings showed that scholars used Twitter for a range of different communicative functions, which were primarily assigned to organizational, self-promotional and networking-related aspects. Posting content-related tweets seemed to be a rather uncommon practice. Tweets related to networking and self-promotion were more likely to include multimodal content in the form of images. Furthermore, as expected, most tweets expressed a rather positive or positive sentiment. These results indicate that conference tweets form an important genre for academics and should be considered in EAP syllabi. Also, conference organizers should promote a conference hashtag if they wish to enable a digital backchannel.