The use of social media in public relations: A comparative research on private educational institutions

Private educational institutions carry out various public relations activities for the promotion of their institutions. At present, institutions utilise social media as an influential medium for conveying public relations activities to the target audience associated with progressing technology and infrastructure. Social media is a crucial medium that involves all the information about the institution, enables it to be constantly updated and to be used in public relations studies to ensure that text, video and visual content are originated and transmitted to the target audience. The aim of this study is to determine how diligently and for what purposes Private Educational Institutions utilise Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram and LinkedIn composing their own corporate social media accounts; how and to what extent they use them for public relations purposes, what kind of public relations models they utilise to share their contents in these accounts, to reveal whether they access the target audience thanks to these platforms used and the content of their communication with them. The population of the research consists of 13,870 private educational institutions operating in Turkey. The research sample includes the ITU ETA Foundation Doğa College, Bahçeşehir College and TED College, which have been private educational institutions since their establishment in Turkey. In the study, corporate social media accounts of these three institutions were examined by content analysis method and structured interviews were conducted with marketing strategy, social media and corporate communication officials located in the institutions' .headquarters. The findings of the structured interviews and content analysis incidicate that private education institutions do not remain indifferent to the changing communication technologies and actively use social media platforms as public relations tool.