It is not enough just to publish, the impact of your publishing as well as visibility is important.
The reasons for having a presence in various spaces (academic vendors, social networking sites, social media, blogging) are, amongst others:
Choose your platforms carefully and ensure that you can keep them up to date. You do not have to be in all spaces. Consider social media options as well. You will see some databases provide metrics on social media views of your work.
A researcher ID enables you to be distinguishable from other researchers and is a way of linking all your research publications and increases your visibility. It enables others to match you with your publications and view information about your research interests etc.
ORCIDs have international recognition. You register with ORCID which is a non-profit company and create your profile.
An ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) provides you with a persistent digital identifier that you own and control. You can create a profile and also add your publications and professional activities. If you link your ORCID with your profile in services such as Web of Science your publication record will be automatically updated.
Make sure you add your ORCID to every publication. The UKZN RIG system requires you to have an ORCID.
Facilities such as Google Scholar and LinkedIn also enable you to set up a profile.
All of these are useful for making yourself more visible.
A WOS researcher ID helps link you with your publications across the Web of Science collections. With this ID you can track citations to your publications and calculate your h index. You are also able to manually add publications from non WOS collections.
You can also link your ORCID with your Web of Science researcher ID. When you have registered for a researcher ID go to your profile and connect your ORCID. You will then be asked to login to your ORCID to verify the details. There is a sync option to sync your profiles.
Such sites include Academia; Research Gate and SSRN (Social Sciences Citation Network). There are others.
These sites are promoting open access and include preprints, collaboration and sharing of publications. You will need to check with the copyright holder of any of your publications if you may upload. You will need to sign in.
University of Oklahoma has a useful page where these sites are critiqued and there are links to articles about these sites and there is information about what you can do with your profile on Academia.edu statistics you can get from the site.
If you have a paper published in a Scopus journal, an author ID is automatically generated and you will be able to see all your publications and also your h index, citations etc.
Do an author search on your name - and affiliation - if you are there, click on your name. You will see your address and other information and your ID. You can add this to your ORCID profile.
Google Scholar has a facility to set up a profile which is automatically updated and you can get a Google Scholar h index as well. This however does not hold as much weight as having a profile in databases such as Web of Science or Scopus. It is better to choose explicit keywords that reflect your interests rather than broad vague ones. At the Google Scholar home page, click on Sign in on the top right hand side to create an account
Unfortunately with Google Scholar, authors with the same names might well find themselves having publications belonging to someone else in their profiles.