Online Attention of Universities in Finland: Are the Bigger Universities Bigger Online too?

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. Conference Topics Webometrics; Altmetrics; Country-level studies