The Impacts of Social Media in Higher Education Institutions: How It Evolves Social Media in Universities

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the importance of social networks in higher education institutions and how today is an essential tool to expose all their activities, achievements, among others, and stay connected with students (and the university community usually). To establish the content and define the strategies, which must be used in the social networks managed by the university; It is essential to know the profile of the users that exist in our social media community. This encompasses multiple audiences ranging from undergraduate students, alumni and future students to parents, teachers, collaborators, researchers and other institutions, the entire community.

This chapter also explores different tips for the correct use of social networks for higher education institutions. In addition, it provides advice on certain errors that should be avoided and that may cause a negative reaction from users. These reactions can increase and many users can begin to expose their discontent in an important way, through social networks, the situation can lead to a crisis. According to Maresh-Fuehrer and Smith “Social media has been recognized in crisis communication research as facilitating both the spread and mitigation of crises” (2015, p. 621). What is a social media crisis? How can it intensify if a quick response is not given? And how can it be managed? They are also part of the analysis that involves understanding the functioning of social networks.

Universities are not only managed under the brand scheme, but a global academic institutional identity scheme, showing all their strengths, advantages and including all the intellectual material created by academics and students as part of their contribution. Universities must disseminate and disseminate everything that is forged as ambassadors of knowledge, therefore, it must have a presence in different events, be they scientific, sports, educational, in newspapers, internet and social networks, where they demonstrate progress, inventions, academic achievements, congresses, conferences and other outreach events. Depending on the extension of the university where you show your careers, postgraduate degrees, faculties or school, you can use multiple pages, it can cause traffic in the cyber city for trend brands and move search analytics. As indicated by Castillo et al. (2013) “The most advantageous universities when it comes to transmitting their brand in the online environment pay attention to innovation as a variable that gives differential value in the coordinates in which higher education currently operates”. (Castillo Diaz, Carillo Durán, & Tato Jiménez, 2013)

Two decades ago it was only planned to handle face-to-face classes, the new advantages of virtual classrooms change the focus on the way of teaching through portals, online games, digital resources such as social networks, videos or audios, adaptation of materials, digital materials hypertext, content on web pages, ICT skills, etc. (Barberá & Badía, 2004) We have edX, which is one of the virtual classrooms worldwide that has quite a lot of prestige and is endorsed by several of the best universities and institutes, it was founded by Harvard University and MIT in 2012, they seek to increase the level of virtual or face-to-face education in anywhere, it has 90 partners and they offer quality courses from the best universities in the world. (edX, 2012)

Social networks and especially in universities, academic social networks are a great tool to expose the information that you have generated with your team. Relations between institutions are managed through simultaneous digital communication media, there are more and more users, some of them allow you to share information, documents, among others, they are a good option to work as a team, where they can share comments in real time, topics of interest, experiences and hypotheses, among others. According to Merlo in their article on science 2.0: application of the social web to research, they comment that “social networks are excellent virtual laboratories, since they offer all the services that a research group demands: communication resources systems, communication systems, document warehouse and discussion forums” (Merlo Vega, 2010).

In addition, you can speak with the Academic Community Manager, who knows how to disseminate and disseminate research results and upcoming scientific publications, the person who will help the teaching researcher to know how to inform through social networks, academic and professional social networks the progress of your research, through the use of online resources that allow remote information to be shared with different researchers worldwide. (Del Pino, 2016)