Analysis of Twitter Usage in Educational Institutions of Pakistan

Abstract

Social media has become the integral part of our daily communications. The use of data from social networks for different purposes, such as election prediction, sentimental analysis, marketing, communication, business, and education, is increasing day by day. The micro-bogging site Twitter, has become the center of attention in recent years as researchers have looked at different ways to mine the actual semantics of the information contained in tweets. Previous studies have looked at the impact of Twitter in non-private organizations. Detailed studies of universities around the world have found that Twitter is the most preferred platform of all major universities. In this study, we explore the use of Twitter in all recognized universities of Pakistan. We looked at the Twitter accounts of 89 universities and over 17,000 tweets to identify the usage patterns and classified the tweets on the contents of their message. We found that only 54% of the universities use Twitter. Most of the universities use it for sharing information messages and for community and action based tweets. We also found that the university rankings do not necessarily play any role in the twitter usage frequency. Our approach is significant as it concentrates on a central feature of organizations’ social media utilization—the actual messages sent.