‘To tweet or not to tweet?’ A study of the use of Twitter by scholarly book publishers in Social Sciences and Humanities

•Twitter is a popular and efficient channel for disseminating scientific outputs, it seems to be an acceptable publisher engagement rate, but still the minority. Only 12% of the surveyed books were mentioned by their publisher Twitter accounts on Twitter from 2014 to 2018.•More and more publishers are participating in Twitter book promotion. Compared with some traditional publishing giants, media-small publishers have higher Twitter engagement.•Publisher play an important role in the scientific communication process on Twitter, books were mentioned by their publishers on Twitter get more tweets than books were mentioned by non-publishers.