Discovering University Engagement and Social Media Interaction on Twitter

Having deeply changed our communicating way, nowadays social media represent one of the most transformative challenge both within and outside organizations (Aral, Dellarocas & Godes, 2013). They also provide a vibrant space for universities: informally, students, researchers, enterprises, institutions and staff can dialogue, share information, listen communities, comment and discuss about specific topics. However, while universities seem to utilize social media, still there are massive misunderstandings about the real level of the emerging interaction and engagement dynamics. Many studies focus on this issue, but they are limited to analyse the relationship between universities and students without considering all their stakeholders. This paper investigates the level of interaction generated within Twitter by 100 Business and Economics prestigious universities all over the world. We analyse dynamics linked to typical interaction indicators, which should produce the content necessary to stimulate interaction and discussion, being them constantly updated. This means that differently from most of literature based on content analysis, our study focuses on the interaction level generated by universities on the Twitter platform. Our findings reveal the weakness of prestigious universities: if they generally present and propose constantly updated contents, the university community does not generate interaction. The typical indicator values concerning mention, reply and retweet, are low. Therefore, we may conclude that universities tend to use a “megaphone model”, in which the primary aim is to spread information without being interested in stimulating interaction.