Abstract:

Over the last few years the usage of social media has extremely increased. Actually, recent studies show that the 81% of Spanish Internet users from 16 to 55 years old are social media users (IAB, 2016). This amazing success is due to the fact that the use of social media and social network sites (SNS) allow customers to build and maintain relationships with each other (Boyd & Ellison, 2008).

In this regard companies have developed their own profile within these platforms, the so called brand pages (Zaglia, 2013), with the aim of building and maintaining relationships with customers. For this reason social media have become very useful for firms and organizations, allowing them to accomplish some communication and marketing objectives, such as: to attract new customers, to manage the customer-brand relationships but also to promote products or services and relay information (Schivinski and Dabrowski, 2014).

In the specific market segment of college students, social media and SNS have become the most popular communication channels (Pelling & White, 2009) and its usage has developed a great success (Ellison et al., 2011).

Based on the previous statements, universities have taken advantage of the use of SNS as a tool to establish a way of communication with students and any other stakeholder. However, few studies have been identified to understand the real strategies that universities are developing to carry out their communication goals and what differences can be identified among them.

Then, in this paper we focus on analysing the use of SNS as a communication tool for Spanish universities.

First, the theoretical framework about the concept and characteristics of SNS and the university system in Spain is exposed. Second, the methodology to analyse the way of online communication (website, social network sites,…) by Spanish universities is suggested. To do this, a sample of 82 Spanish universities (public and private, in-person and virtually) was collected and subsequently it was analysed according to different SNS variables (presence, response, generation, suggestion) which perform the so called PRGS model.
Finally, the main results and conclusions of this study are proposed.

Keywords:

Social media, social network sites, universities, communication, marketing.