Social Media Aspect of Corporate Profiles of Universities: The Divide Between Public and Private Universities

Abstract

The changes in the field of communication that have been taking place all over the world since 1990 have resulted in a polyphonic communication structure in Turkey. From the 2000s on, in particular, the Web 2.0 interactive media allowing individual users to create their own content have also had a deep impact on communication at the organizational level. From a comparative perspective, this study aims to analyze the use of social media by organizations in Turkey in terms of the concepts of corporate identity and corporate communication. For this purpose, the corporate social network profiles of the Turkish universities established after 2007 were analyzed through content analysis. In this study, which can be considered as a summary of our project supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK), the universities in Turkey were analyzed by focusing on social media networks. The data, obtained from the social media network named Facebook, which is used by 43 state universities and 36 foundation universities in Turkey, were analyzed by applying 8 different criterion categories that had been revealed by our surveying method conducted within the scope of the study. Appearance, frequency of re-occurrence, and intensity were used for this analysis. This study is significant as it presents a new approach concerning the subject, and it provides a model related to the organizational/institutional use of social media networks.