A comparative study in higher education institutions on the use of social media in public relations

The public relations, which traces from the past to the present, have started to use different tools besides the traditional tools with the development of the internet. These tools are net-based social media platforms. Social media platforms let organizations and institutions to get closer to their target audience and to implement public relations more actively. As the social media increase its influence from day to day, these environments provided a great advantage for universities to increase the communication with their target audience and thus to promote themselves. In this study which is based on how Facebook and Twitter are used by the universities in social media, the appearance of Facebook and Twitter accounts of universities were tried to be described. Another aim of the study is to analyse which universities use Facebook and Twitter more actively, what are the shares, and the distribution of the shares regarding the weekdays and weekends using the content analysis method. The population of the study consists of the verified Facebook and Twitter accounts of 185 universities in Turkey in 2017 while the sample of the study consists of 10 state university ranked in URAP TR 2016-2017 and 10 foundation universities in URAP TR 2016-2017. Facebook and Twitter accounts of the two groups were analysed using Boomsocial computation and analysis software. This study aims to understand which group is more active in which platform and whether there are differences in usage between the groups. As a result of the research, it is possible to say that the universities do not follow a common social media policy as state and foundation university group, that each university's target group is unique, that the expectations of the target group are different, and that they respond differently to different criteria.