Social media analytics with facebook-the case of higher education institutions

Abstract

Social Media Analytics has developed into a new research field within information science in the last years. Due to this fact, currently only a few research results about the usage of Social Media Analytics exist. To fill this gap, we conducted an international delphi study among selected higher education institutions (HEIs) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland which are applying Social Media Analytics related to Facebook. The results demonstrate that the majority of HEIs use more than one Social Media Analytics software tool and consider different Facebook metrics pre-dominantly on a monthly basis to evaluate and to develop their Facebook activities. We conclude that many HEIs lack an integrated Social Media Analytics strategy, under-utilize the real-time capabilities of Social Media Analytics and would benefit from Social Media Analytics.