Social Media Mix in the University Communication Plan: A Bridge Towards Public Engagement: Structured Abstract

The role of Higher Education in the social context has been always object of debate within the academic community and not only. Universities have always been responsible for the traditional functions of education and knowledge transfer but, across all the European countries, a “Third Mission” imposes to universities to be also a “partner” that collaborates at the community's growth. In this sense, social networks can be a tool to create an effective bridge between research, teaching and public services by means of the possibility of sharing information, opinions and ideas in real time and in a multimedia way. This research investigates which forms of social media communication are mainly used by the European Universities to engage their own stakeholders by performing a comparative analysis of the posts in Twitter and Facebook. Furthermore, this research deals with the problem of gauging the engagement rate in the University by means of social network advancing the current stateof-the-art about the analysis of the social media use within public engagement strategies.