THE ONLINE MARKETING TOOLS USED BY THE SPANISH FACULTIES OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

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.

In the specific market segment of college students, social media and SNS have become the most popular communication channels and its usage has developed a great success.

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, in some cases universities do not only develop one presence at SNS but they develop several pages or profiles, according to the number of schools, faculties or services they have.

Then, in this paper we focus on analysing the use of SNS as a communication tool for some specific faculties: those which, at least, teach the Business Adminsitration Degree.

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 and social media) by Spanish faculties which offer the Business Administration degree is suggested. To do this, a sample of 82 Spanish universities (public and private, in-person and virtually) was collected. Subsequently, the analysis was focused in identifying if each university had at least one faculty of Business Administration. The initial results for this analysis showed 92 faculties that were listed to make a deeper analysis, focusing on the use of social media as online marketing tools for the mentioned faculties. Some of the main results bring to light that 72 out of 92 faculties get its own website, while only 39 include it the logo of at least one social network. After the social media analysis for these 39 faculties took place, the study focused on analysis the use of Twitter. Finally, the conclusions of the paper are proposed.