Copyright Fiorenza Oppici at CeDEM14

1. SocialUniversity:How Do
Universities Use Social Media?
An Empirical Survey of
Italian Academic Institutions
Fiorenza Oppici, Simone Basso, Juan Carlos De Martin
CeDEM Conference for eDemocracy and Open Government, Krems
May 22, 2014

2. Thanks to:
• Juan Carlos De Martin – Ideation, supervision
• Claudio Artusio, Simone Basso, Giuseppe Futia, Raimondo
Iemma, Federico Morando – research planning, supervision and
editing
• Giovanni Arata – Support and advice
• Net7 – for providing free access to data collection tools
The paper discussed in this presentation was drafted in the context of the Network of
Excellence on Internet Science EINS (GA n°288021), and, in particular, in relation with the
case studies concerning Virtual Communities (JRA6). The authors acknowledge the support
of the European Commission and are grateful to the network members for their support.

3. What is SocialUniversity?
oIt’s a research project of the Nexa Center for Internet &
Society (DAUIN) at Politecnico di Torino
oIt aims to inspect the behavior of italian universities on
social networking sites
oIt’s the first research which widely discusses the field of
academic social media usage in the italian context.
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4. SocialUniversity research
questions
o How many universities are on Twitter and Facebook? Since
when?
o How many followers/likes do they have?
o Who manages the accounts?
o What are they sharing and how often?
o Do universities answer to inquiries posted on their social
networking accounts?
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o Are they open to comments?
o Do universities have accounts on social networking sites
other than Facebook and Twitter?
o Are deans and italian educational agencies on Facebook and
Twitter ?
o Which is the performance of the italian tech schools
compared to the european ones?
SocialUniversity research
questions

6. Methodology
o We used SocialProxy from the Net7 startup based in
Pisa for collecting data, which we then processed with
our custom Java code (approx. 700 code lines);
oad-hoc API queries (approx. 300 code lines in Java);
oe-mail surveys;
omanual data collection directly from the social
networking sites’ interfaces.
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7. Italian Universities
96 universities:
67 are state-run;
29 private (among
whose 11 are online and
18 are not).
Central Italy only has
the 42% of italian
universities.
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8. The students’ population
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9. The professoral population
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10. How many universties are
on Facebook?
o85 Facebook accounts of 81 universities,
o80 pages and 5 personal accounts
oAutomatically generated page aren’t included in
the sample
oThe sample holds general purpose and student
consulting accounts.
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11. Since when? (Facebook)
First established
account in the
sample:
Politecnico di Torino
(July 2008)
Latest account in the
sample:
Università del
Sannio di Benevento
(July 2013).
3
10
13
30
19
10
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
Year of establishment
Newaccounts
New accounts per year (Facebook)
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12. How many universities are
on Twitter?
o79 accounts of 73 insitutes, making the 76% of
italian universities
oThe sample comprehends general purpose
accounts and special relevant cases
oSome accounts have just one or zero tweets
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13. First account
established in the
sample:
Università delle
Scienze
Gastronomiche
(May 2009)
Most recent:
UniTrento (April
2013)
Since when? (Twitter)
9
25
20 20
5
2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
Year of establishment
Newaccounts
New accounts per year (Twitter)
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50%
11%
10%
7%
7%
15%
Account Management – Facebook
Communication Department
Counseling Department
Online Communication Department
Department for communication on
Social Networks
Pr Department
Other

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56%
10%
9%
5%
20%
Account Management - Twitter
Communication Department
Online Communication Department
Department for Communication on
Social Networking sites
Counseling Department
Other

16. How many followers?
How many «Like»?
o Absolute measurement: the amount of «Likes» or friends on Facebook and the
amount of followers on Twitter.
o Weighed measurement has been computed relatively to the expected
population of universities on social networking platforms according to the
following:
Expected population = (s ∙ Us) + (p ∙ Up)
s = amount of students
p = amount of professors
Us = rate of students with an account (on Twitter or on Facebook)
Up = rate of professor with an account (on Twitter or on Facebook)
The weighed measurement is based on Censis’ 2012 reports of social media
penetration in different age brackets, not taking in account socio-economical
informations, thus the measurement is probably downwardly extimated.
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17. Absolute and weighed ranking
-Facebook
Weighed ranking:
o3 Privately run online
universities
o2 Universities for
foreigners
o3 Superior Graduate
Schools (Normale,
SSUP and IMT)
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Absolute ranking:
o2 Tech schools(PoliTo,
PoliMi)
o9 large universities
(>10,000 students)
o7 on 10 are state-run
universities
As of September 30°, 2013

18. Absolute and weighed ranking
- Twitter
Weighed ranking:
o1 University for foreigners
o4 Superior graduate
schools (SISSA, IMT
Lucca, Normale, SSUP)
o5 Privately run
universities
oMostly small institutes
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Absolute ranking:
o Not surprisingly, all are
large institutes (> 10,000
students)
o 8 of ten are state-run
universities
As of September 30°, 2013:

19. How often do they post?
1.4 average daily posts on Twitter (both original tweets and retweets)
1.8 average daily posts on Facebook
1.1 average daily posts on Facebook are written by universities (only 43%
allows comments on their walls)
The majority of accounts posts messages less than once daily: 61% on
Twitter and 67% on Facebook.
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Posts from June 20 to September 30, 2013

20. What do they share?
oNews on campus life and events
oReminders about deadlines, taxes and competitive exams
oCurrent news regarding science, literature and research
oChanges and new courses in the curriculum
oAccounts of new book acquisitions (v. @OAPoliTorino)
oSocial media-based ad campaigns (v. Università di Macerata)
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21. Do they answer to inquiries?
On Twitter:
oAn ad hoc API Query run on October 27, 2013 found that in
average 2% of tweets are response tweets.
oNearly half of the accounts never posted a response tweet.
OnFacebook:
oManual search started on October 25, 2013:
oJust 5 accounts with the higher percentage of post from other
users
oThe answering rate was computed on the 10 last questions
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35%
46%
12%
7%
Percentageofaccounts
Openness level of Facebook Accounts
High (4 features)
Medium - High (3 features)
Medium (2 features)
Low (1 feature)

24. Do they automatically link
Twitter-Facebook?
Just few universities have this approach:
LUM – Libera Università Jean Monnet @UniLUM – LUM – Libera
Università Mediterranea
Università della Val d’Aosta @univda - Università della Valle d'Aosta -
Université de la Vallée d'Aoste
IUAV Venezia @iuav - Università Iuav di Venezia
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26. Are agencies on Facebook
and Twitter?
MIUR (Italian ministry for Education and Research) is
on Facebook (MIUR Social) and Twitter (@MiurSocial)
Italian deans: averagely they are 61 years old, 16% of
them have a Twitter account and 24% are on Facebook.
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27. A small sample of tech schools:
oTech schools from abroad: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne (EPFL), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Lausanne(ETHZ), Technical University of Munich (TUM), and from
Italy: Politecnico di Milano.
Aim:
oinspect beyond the italian frame
ocompare the Politecnico di Torino media strategy to those of other
comparable european technical universities.
International comparison
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28. oUniversities in the sample post 0.5 messages per day on Facebook and
1.4 messages per day Twitter
oThe Swiss Federal School in Lausanne (EPFL) is the most popular
account of the sample both onFacebook (2.3 like/expected population)
and on Twitter (1.8 followers/ like/expected population)
o95% of posts on the Politecnico di Torino Facebook wall are from other
users, making it the Facebook page with more posts from other users
o Politecnico di Torino responding rate was just of 2% while the average is
55% – the answers were asked via private messaging in a period
stretching from mid September to mid October.
oForeign universities use Twitter mainly for promoting their research
results; the italian ones use it for posting notices and reminders.
International comparison
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29. International comparison
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International
Students’
Rate (%) Twitter accounts Tweets in
EPFL - Lausanne 40% 3 French, english
ETH - Zurich 29% 2 English, german
TUM - Munich 18% 1 German
Politecnico di Torino 15% 1 Italian, english
Politecnico di Milano 9% 2 Italian, chinese, english
Rate of international students(%) and multilingual Twitter
accounts

30. Comparison with
governmental agencies
Compared to italian governmental local agencies italian universities:
• Are more recognizable as such: (for instance, they use their logo as the
profile image, they provide a description and links to their official
webpages)
• Are more context and platform-aware (less institutes have personal
profiles on Facebook, and on Twitter they know and use hashtags and
mentions)
• They use media contents as a tool for engagement
• According to the users, they are faster in problem solving and
answering to inquiries than they are in the main channels.
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Contacts
mailto : fiorenza.oppici@studenti.polito.it
SocialUniversity repository at GitHub:
https://github.com/fiorenzaoppici/socialuniversity