Higher Education Institutions on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter: Comparing Swiss Universities’ Social Media Communication

Public communication has become more important to higher education institutions (HEIs), with many HEIs using social media communicate stakeholders. However, scholarship on the subject is scarce and mainly based single-platform studies small datasets. Therefore, we conducted a cross-platform study examine of all Swiss Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The results were two datasets: an automated analysis data for (<em>n</em> = 42) their accounts from 2004 2021 (337,232 posts 207 accounts), manual content 1,500 per platform. By including in one country, this allowed comparison by HEI type: universities applied sciences, teacher education, research universities. Results show that, recent years, increased but not Facebook or Twitter was used most universities, while Instagram sciences. Universities least active across platforms. types primarily self-referential. Our how well affordances relative hypertextuality multimodality revealed generally high level adaption. Moreover, our showed no substantial impact Covid-19 pandemic posting activities engagement first years pandemic.