As universities have entered a time of increased demand for public outreach and measurable impact, the universities are also exploring social media for student recruitment and science communication. Because many of the popular social media sites are free to use they could provide more democratic channels for organizational communication and marketing efforts. This research in progress investigates the social media presences of 14 universities in Finland and studies whether the offline performances of the universities are reflected in social media. The results suggest that while the RG score from ResearchGate and the Google Trends score for relative search volume correlate well with both productivity of the universities and university rankings, some of the other social media sites do not reflect the institutional characteristics as well. This is assumed to be a result of different types of usage and different purposes of the different social media sites.

1. Online attention of
universities in Finland:
Are the bigger universities bigger online too?
Kim Holmberg
Research Unit for the Sociology of Education
University of Turku
(e) kim.j.holmberg@utu.fi
(w3) http://kimholmberg.fi
@kholmber

2. This research in progress investigates
whether smaller universities are taking
full advantage of the more democratic
ways of communication or are the
bigger universities with more resources
also “bigger” in social media?
Research question

3. • Aalto University
• Hanken School of Economics
• University of Helsinki
• University of Eastern Finland
• University of Jyväskylä
• University of Lapland
• Lappeenranta University of Technology
• University of Oulu
• Tampere University of Technology
• University of Tampere
• University of Turku
• University of Vaasa
• Åbo Akademi University
• University of the Arts
Universities

5. • RG score (institutional)
• Google Trends score (relative)
• Tweets in Twitter
• Followers on Twitter
• Following on Twitter
• Facebook likes
• YouTube subscriptions
• YouTube views
• LinkedIn followers
• PhDs awarded in 2012
• Faculty staff hours in 2012
• Research funding in 2012
• Peer-reviewed publications in 2012
Data

7. ???

10. Correlations between the social media
metrics and offline metrics
RG GT Tw Tw.a Tw.b FB YTs YTv LI PhD. Fa. Fu. Pu.
RG 1 0,679 0,473 0,367 0,046 0,389 0,337 0,204 0,385 0,923 0,938 0,952 0,969
GT 1 0,444 0,435 0,251 0,266 0,316 0,342 0,160 0,750 0,690 0,648 0,746
Tw 1 0,776 0,516 0,345 0,579 0,587 0,618 0,670 0,604 0,534 0,543
Tw.a 1 0,499 0,059 0,557 0,613 0,749 0,551 0,468 0,393 0,420
Tw.b 1 -0,099 0,233 0,314 0,196 0,192 0,143 0,064 0,116
FB 1 0,260 0,015 -0,178 0,463 0,574 0,604 0,389
YTs 1 0,871 0,700 0,397 0,414 0,392 0,317
YTv 1 0,754 0,333 0,266 0,231 0,284
LI 1 0,423 0,349 0,323 0,380
PhD. 1 0,974 0,949 0,960
Fa. 1 0,987 0,947
Fu. 1 0,943
Pu. 1
Table 1. Spearman rank correlations between the social media metrics and offline
metrics of the 14 universities in Finland. Correlations in bold are significant at the
0.05 level, two-tailed. (RG = RG score; GT = Google Trends score; Tw = Tweets
in Twitter; Tw.a = Followers on Twitter; Tw.b = Following on Twitter; FB =
Facebook likes; YTs = YouTube subscriptions; YTv = YouTube views; LI =
LinkedIn followers; Phd. = PhDs awarded in 2012; Fa. = Faculty in 2012; Fu. =
Research funding in 2012; Pu. = Peer-reviewed publications in 2012).

11. RG Score vs Publications
Figure 1. Correlation between the RG score (from ResearchGate) and
the number of peer reviewed publications in 2012 at the Finnish
universities (0.969 Spearman).
University of
Helsinki

12. Google Trends vs Publications
Figure 2. Correlation between the search volume as measured by
Google Trends and the number of peer reviewed publications in 2012
at the Finnish universities (0.746 Spearman).
University of
Helsinki
University of
Eastern Finland
Aalto University
University of
Jyväskylä

13. Our results show that while in many cases the larger and more
productive universities are also more active or receive more
attention in social media; this is not always the case.
The institutional RG scores and the RG scores for individual
researchers on ResearchGate, may be a promising source for
altmetrics at institutional and possibly even country level.
Due to the uncertainty of how the RG score exactly is
calculated and because of the use of journal impact factors in
that calculation more research into the topic is clearly needed.
Conclusions

14. Kim Holmberg
kim.j.holmberg@utu.fi
http://kimholmberg.fi
@kholmber
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