Benchmarking Analysis of Social Media Strategies in the Higher Education Sector

The adoption of social media networks by organizations has been increasing, mainly by using more social networks but also by constantly increasing on the number of messages and received comments posted on these channels. Interestingly, this process apparently has not been accompanied by a carefully planned and strategically design process to provide the essential alignment with organizational goals. This study is framed in the tertiary sector, the Higher Education Sector (HES), which despite its peculiarities, is no exception to the above limitations, and is facing an increased competitive environment. In this paper we present a sector benchmarking process, and the respective analysis, to provide insights on the sector's tendency, as well as a threefold classification of the sector's social media strategies being pursued. The analysis builds upon a regulatory communication framework and respective editorial model. We describe the results of our automatic text-mining and categorization information system, specifically developed to address and analyze the seven categories of HES’ social media messages. Our results show that social media strategies have been focusing essentially on mediatization and building/maintaining the organizational image/reputation as well as on advertising educational services, but completely neglecting the dialogical dimension intrinsically linked to social media environments.