Looking for the Sustainability Messages of European Universities’ Social Media Communication during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Organizations in general, and higher education institutions in particular, had to face many challenges during the pandemic in order to carry out their usual activities. Since communications and interactions between universities and students were required to take place online, the messages sent by universities on their social media platforms held greater importance. In this regard, the purpose of the paper was to identify the promotion strategies used by European universities on Facebook and Instagram in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, we were interested in identifying differences and similarities in the types of messages European universities sent on the two social networks, regarding the way they communicated about sustainability. The method used in order to conduct the research was content analysis, while having as an instrument a content analysis grid. We analyzed the activity of 20 European universities included in the World University Rankings 2021. The results of the research revealed that universities communicated more on Facebook than on Instagram, that the most frequent messages regarding sustainability were the ones about the actions carried out by universities in order to protect the environment, and that they registered a higher engagement rate on Instagram than on Facebook.

Higher Education Institutions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: Comparing Swiss Universities’ Social Media Communication

“…We did not find a pronounced impact of the pandemic on the intensity, content, or engagement with social media content published by Swiss HEIs during the first two years of the pandemic except for higher engagement with posts of research universities in 2020. This seems to contrast case studies reporting differences in HEIs' social media use during the pandemic (e.g., Bularca et al, 2022) but may also be due to the broad quantitative measures used in our study to facilitate a broad census of all Swiss HEIs.…”

A Bibliometric Analysis of Virtual Reality Applications in Anthropology between 2010 and 2023

“…5) Serious games were used for educational purposes, research analysis and cultural heritage conservation 9 . In the last decade, numerous articles dedicated to this ample topic have been published 41 . While the extent of this topic far exceeds the scope of our article, the applications of serious games for VR have been studied by researchers belonging to numerous scienti c elds 42 .…”

Navigating the COVID-19 Crisis: Higher Education Institutions and the Three Shades of Social Media Communication

“…This study thus makes both theoretical and empirical contributions. First, it provides new insights on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the higher education sector by building on studies concerning the use of SM in the higher education sector [18][19][20][21]. However, only a few publications have specifically focused on the usage of SM by HEIs as a tool to communicate with stakeholders during a crisis [18,22,23], Moreover, none of these studies adopted a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches.…”

“…First, it provides new insights on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in the higher education sector by building on studies concerning the use of SM in the higher education sector [18][19][20][21]. However, only a few publications have specifically focused on the usage of SM by HEIs as a tool to communicate with stakeholders during a crisis [18,22,23], Moreover, none of these studies adopted a mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches. For example, Coelho and Figueira (2021) [22] explored how the pandemic influenced the content strategies of HEIs by analyzing Twitter posts and employing machine learning and topic modeling techniques to trace shifts in content themes during the pandemic.…”