 Welcome again. Let's talk about media and communication once again. Social media has become increasingly important way for higher education institutions to communicate with stakeholders. But there is still relatively little research on how they are using these platforms or how the institutions are using these platforms. And so I invited Isabelle Sorensen to provide us new insights into the communication practices of Swiss higher education institutions and how they vary depending on the type of institution and what can we learn from those findings. Isabelle, welcome to our episode. Thank you very much for having me. Isabelle, tell us about the importance of talking about this, although it seems a bit obvious about the social media presence, the dynamics of higher education institutions. Yeah, so I think, first of all, it's important to say that we believe universities are very interesting organizations because they are in the cross section between society and science. And so, of course, they have this mission to educate skilled workforce by teaching, generate new knowledge by research, but they also contribute to solve issues of society, societal problems through this third mission. And a new channel that has been emerging is social media. There is very little research on how universities, and when I say universities, I mean various types of universities, I'll come back to that, but how universities they communicate with societal stakeholders on these platforms and that we have been looking at in this study. You mentioned in your article that many studies have focused mostly, and I think you are addressing this on high ranked elite research universities and, well, people assume that developments occurred across all higher education institution types as a whole. Is this true or was there any other research gap that you wanted to fill? There were several. One was, as you say, highly ranked universities, mostly from the Anglo-Saxon sphere. What we wanted was to do or to bridge this gap by making a full sample of a country and include various types of universities because there is some research on research universities, but there is almost none out there on universities of applied sciences and universities of teacher education that are equally higher education institutions and have an important task of communicating with relevant stakeholders. Okay, so you have building up the curiosity, so tell us the results, the findings of your study. Yeah, I think first of all, our first major finding was that we found all these universities, the full sample in Switzerland, Switzerland is relatively small country, but it has astonishing 42 higher education institutions. And we found the uttermost of them on all three platforms that we looked at. We looked at Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. And we looked at the adoption when that they adopted their channels. We also looked at if they were using and how much they were using the channels and what engagement with the content look like. And we found some astonishing differences across different types. For example, universities of teacher education that educate teachers for schools, they are almost non present on these platforms, they publish content but they do it very little. And we also found preferences of types of universities so the universities of applied sciences, they are very active on Instagram and on Facebook, but the research universities are the most active on Twitter. Then, interestingly, when we look at the general preference is that higher education institutions, they are least active on Instagram, but it's actually where we found the engagement to be the highest, and the highest by far so But if they post content on Instagram, they have much more echo live like shares and and so it seems that this kind of content it resonates well with audiences, whereas on Facebook, for example, this engagement is declining. Okay, I tell me about potential policy implications of this. None. No, policy. I think our study has to be read like it's for scholars that wants to understand how how the communication of science and has is changing. So that's one of our audiences, another audience and a very important audience are the practitioners. So the people that actually administrate accounts for universities and make social media strategies. And we think that this study can can enlighten what would be better strategies for example investing more in content generation on Instagram, rather than on Facebook. I don't think there are any large policy implications you can say maybe policy implications of a communication strategy added. But yeah, sure. So let's look at the scholarly side of it. Future research should now look at what more social media platforms, complimentary with for example news content because you said that universities are in between society and science. So what's what's ahead of us. To my primary two things. We would like to understand better it should be understood better how media coverage is portrayed or reflected on social media so as you say this. If content that are published in news articles, if it is shared on on social media only and our indications is that it is not that a lot of content on social media is originally created by the universities and it's not simply a copy paste from other platforms so that's the first that we would like future researchers to look at. And the second thing that actually inspired a second study that we are doing now is on understanding engagement metrics better so understanding which factors that influence how users respond to content on social media. And there are a lot of studies on this on various organizational types, but very little from a perspective of universities. And what we are been doing or we're doing at the moment is, we look at factors the steam from content from the account or from the platform itself. And we try to test and see if we can, we can see patterns there exactly. So to understand that better and again it's, it would be with a view to help practitioners make better strategies create more vivid content that resonates better with the audience. You mentioned some research already being conducted in this field. Can you provide research or some additional resources about about social media and higher education institutions. I think I can recommend it's more like a broader it's a book and that came out recently 2021 from entradas and bow and they look at communication of research universities not only on social media but but the broader perspective all their channels. And I think that's very worth recommending. And for for our viewers who are watching in the let's talk about media and communication website scrolling down and this conversation below the video there is the recommended material that that is about just shared. Isabel, let's close this episode if there is it has been straight to the point, but I'm going to ask you to give our audience a punchline so if you if there is anything you want our audience to remember about this talk, what would it be. It would be that this study was very descriptive and descriptive is massively underrated in the sense that we really need that these data to be able to ask qualified follow up questions. So it would be to encourage people I was a bit skeptical myself when we started this. I was skeptical of just publishing a relatively descriptors study, but it has proved very helpful. And I hope for our colleagues to in the future I will see. Straight to the point is a well, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much for having me. For our viewers if you are watching us on YouTube and our YouTube channel, you can find as I said all the resources the materials of this conversation on the let's talk about median communication website, including the article that served as based to this conversation fully open access. You can also listen to this episode alternatively, whatever gets your podcast. There is a newsletter you can subscribe to be on top of the new episodes. And we are also on Twitter. Thank you very much.