Social media has provided researchers with new ways to connect with one another.  No longer do you have to fly across the country to conferences to meet important people.  Now you can Tweet at them.  There are now social media platforms specifically for researchers, including Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley (which also manages citations and PDFs).  These platforms allow you to...

• Create a free researcher profile,
• Share your work more broadly,
• Find collaborators and others interested in your work.

These platforms can also expand access of your research to the general public. Kudos encourages you to summarize your research ins simple language and makes it easy to broadcast it on a variety of social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.).  Impactstory highlights a diverse array of research impacts, including social media and news coverage.

A few cautions:

• All of these platforms (except Impactstory) are for-profit.  There is the possibility they could be bought out or shut down, so these sites are not recommended for long term access and preservation - use an open access repository for that!
• Uploading to multiple platforms can make it more difficult to gather usage statistics.  One tip a researcher shared with me is to upload a document to these platforms with a link to the version of the document in the IR.  This allows readers of your work to be counted in one place.
• These platforms do little to no curation or quality control of content.  Therefore, oftentimes works are shared that violate publisher licenses (see more under the "legal considerations" tab).
• Once you set up an Academia.edu or ResearchGate profile, you may receive frequent emails from them, and they may email your co-authors without your permission.