Social Media Usage at Universities - How Should it Be Done?

Jennifer-Carmen Frey, Martin Ebner, Martin Schön, Behnam Taraghi

2013

Abstract

The social media hype these days is omnipresent, encouraging even public institutions to participate. This study seeks to reveal, which factors have to be kept in mind, when doing social media work at universities. It also is an attempt to provide a list of recommendations and possible fields of action to ensure an efficient presence in social web. Therefore we analyzed the present situation of university efforts and evaluated the success by measuring user engagement concerning different aspects of social media activities (e.g. content, publishing time, frequency of activities, existence of visual elements, additional links, etc.) The study shows, that it seems less important how many times a week a university is publishing, or how long the text messages are in detail, but that there is a significant relationship between the contents of a post, the time of its publishing and the used elements, pointing out that users actively perceive and interact with social media activities that encourage contact between both: the profile-owner with the community and the community amongst itself - especially if made in a personal, emotional or funny way, offering people ways to identify with the institution and to connect with it through well-known habits and traditions.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Frey J., Ebner M., Schön M. and Taraghi B. (2013). Social Media Usage at Universities - How Should it Be Done? . In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: FWP, (WEBIST 2013) ISBN 978-989-8565-54-9, pages 608-614. DOI: 10.5220/0004515506080614

in Bibtex Style

@conference{fwp13,
author={Jennifer-Carmen Frey and Martin Ebner and Martin Schön and Behnam Taraghi},
title={Social Media Usage at Universities - How Should it Be Done?},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: FWP, (WEBIST 2013)},
year={2013},
pages={608-614},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0004515506080614},
isbn={978-989-8565-54-9},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Volume 1: FWP, (WEBIST 2013)
TI - Social Media Usage at Universities - How Should it Be Done?
SN - 978-989-8565-54-9
AU - Frey J.
AU - Ebner M.
AU - Schön M.
AU - Taraghi B.
PY - 2013
SP - 608
EP - 614
DO - 10.5220/0004515506080614