The “Liked” Department: Using Facebook Analytics for Strategic Communication

Abstract

T h e P r o f e s s i o n O rganizational communication has undergone dramatic changes in recent years as organizations of all types have rushed to experiment with social media as a means of interacting with key publics. In particular, colleges and universities have a keen interest in this trend, given that they are marketed as innovative institutions and that their target demographic is tech-savvy young people. The rapid adoption of social media technologies has resulted in poorly understood changes in why or how academic departments use sites such as Facebook and the eff ects that using social media to communicate various types of content have on student engagement.Scholars have produced an impressive amount of research focusing on how social media can be incorporated into the classroom to enhance the learning process. Far less research has examined how universities and their various subunits, particularly academic departments, use social media to achieve goals outside of the classroom. This is perplexing given that even a cursory review shows that many university entities and subunits have a social media presence that is unrelated to classroom activities. Is social media being used for its own sake or is it actually accomplishing specifi c goals-and, if so, how? The purpose of this article is to answer these questions by examining how one academic department's Facebook page has been ABSTRACT used to recruit prospective students and to share information with current students. This purpose was achieved by developing a content typology that allowed the authors to determine which types of posts generate the most student response or interest. The fi ndings off er important lessons for those who want to use social media for organizational communication in higher academia. LITERATURE REVIEWThe advent of personal computing and the Internet promised to usher in a new era of possibilities for organizations to communicate with and engage their key stakeholders and the general public. However, much of the research suggests that organizations have struggled to use these technologies, perhaps as a result of lacking the know-how or the staff to create content and monitor feedback (Kent, Taylor, and White 2003;Saxton, Guo, and Brown 2007). Online social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter have the potential to mitigate these obstacles, given that they are free and incredibly easy to use and have built-in interactivity that provides organizations, both large and small, the opportunity to maintain real-time contact with a wide variety of stakeholders (Waters 2007).The potential of social media to enhance organizational communication is particularly intriguing to those working in higher education. Whereas e-mail continues to be the dominant form of communication on college campuses, studies suggest that many students prefer social media (boyd and Ellison 2007;Lenhart, Madden, and Hitlin 2005). The ubiquitous and interactive nature of social media opens up several avenues to further the missions of colleges and univers...

Korean-popular Facebook fan page analytics in Thailand

“…Facebook analytics (FA) reflects on the framework of relations between various fan pages players, such as individuals, associations, organizations, and countries, or human activity favorites. FA has been widely used in many research disciplines (e.g., health [51], e-commerce [52], learning [53], communication [54], news [55], advertising and marketing [56], libraries [57], and airways [58]). However, the issue as to whether FA can be suited for analyzing Korean popular culture has yet to be addressed in depth.…”