Platforms matter: analyzing user engagement with social media content of Swiss higher education institutions

Higher education institutions (HEIs) increasingly use social media to communicate with stakeholders and the public. The success of these efforts on individual platforms has been assessed by a growing number of studies recently. However, comparative research across different platforms and types of HEIs is lacking. This study analyzes factors influencing user engagement across different HEI types and the three most widely used platforms – Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). The study relies on a full sample of all social media posts published in 2019 (n = 42,006) by all 42 Swiss HEIs. Hereof, a random sample of 1500 posts per platform was manually coded. Several factors at the content-level turned out to vary across platforms, thereby pointing to the need for HEIs to tailor their social media communication to the respective affordances of different platforms. However, results also show patterns across platforms, including the importance of visual communication and the development of a large followership for driving user engagement. In contrast, we found no impact of publishing time, publishing frequency, and content length. This, among other findings, indicates that strategies focused on creating high-quality content rather than a large quantity of content yield better engagement results for the social media communication of HEIs.