  In order to better understand the effect of social media in the dissemination
of scholarly articles, employing the daily updated referral data of 110 PeerJ
articles collected over a period of 345 days, we analyze the relationship
between social media attention and article visitors directed by social media.
Our results show that social media presence of PeerJ articles is high. About
68.18% of the papers receive at least one tweet from Twitter accounts other
than @PeerJ, the official account of the journal. Social media attention
increases the dissemination of scholarly articles. Altmetrics could not only
act as the complement of traditional citation measures but also play an
important role in increasing the article downloads and promoting the impacts of
scholarly articles. There also exists a significant correlation among the
online attention from different social media platforms. Articles with more
Facebook shares tend to get more tweets. The temporal trends show that social
attention comes immediately following publication but does not last long, so do
the social media directed article views.
