How to Promote Your Journal

Social media is a great way of reaching new and existing communities and sharing messages about your journal and the research it publishes. Social media can also help you to meet new collaborators and discover new themes and trends in your field of research.

Tips for promoting your journal on social media

• Actively join conversations and build an online presence. Engage with other pages and respond to comments on your own posts.
• Regularly post news and updates from the journal such as an interesting new paper or whenever a new issue has been published.
• Find online subject communities that you can join.
• Follow conferences and post using the hashtag to reach delegates.

Conferences are a great opportunity to connect and mingle with your peers. If you’re attending a conference, in person or online, look for relevant opportunities to mention your journal the research it publishes.

If related to the conference topic, you might want to promote your journal on social media using the conference hashtag so that you can reach the delegates.

Talk to the conference organizers to see if you can organize a “meet the editor” session or an editor’s panel to engage with the conference delegates directly. If possible, bring leaflets or business cards that you can hand out to the people you meet.

A simple yet effective way to promote your journal is to include it in your email signature. This way you can call attention to it in your regular correspondence with your peers and other contacts. Write a promotional sentence and link to the journal’s website.

Organizing awards and prizes, or if possible, funding an award, is a good way of promoting your journal as well as recognizing and rewarding researchers, authors and reviewers.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. You could organize an award that recognizes the best papers at a conference or a paper that has been published in a particular volume.
2. You could also consider using awards as an opportunity to reward the work of early career researchers or students.
3. Alternatively, you might want to give a prize for most impact by a paper or even a review, which is a way to show appreciation for the different contributors who helped make your journal happen.

Remember that recognition doesn’t necessarily need to come with a monetary reward. Sometimes the honor of having your work recognized publicly and in front of your peers is even more important.

If you’ve published groundbreaking or newsworthy research, you may want to consider reaching out to the media and writing a press release. This will raise the visibility of the research and the journal to existing and new audiences, within and outside of academia.

Hints and Tips

• If you have published a paper that you think is newsworthy and could be of public interest, contact your journal contact at De Gruyter Brill who can engage the internal PR Team.
• Find publications within your subject field and send them the press release to reach a targeted audience.