A Three-Step Data-Mining Analysis of Top-Ranked Higher Education Institutions' Communication on Facebook

Organizations are rushing into social media networks following a worldwide trend to create a social presence in multiple media channels. However, a social media strategy needs to be aligned with and framed in the overall organizational strategic management goals. Higher Educational Institutions (HEI) are not different from other organizations in which concerns these problems. Determining the organizational positioning of an organization current strategy will allow to combine monitoring and benchmarking methods to foster the identification of opportunities and threats, which can serve as inputs for the internal evaluation of social media strategies', for the necessary strategic readjustments and a subsequent efficiency measurement. In order to address these challenges, we propose a three-step automatic data-mining procedure to assess the posting behavior and strategy of HEI, understand the editorial policy behind it, and predict the future HEI engagement. We used a sample of the 5-top ranked educational institutions in 2017. We collected the posts from each HEI official Facebook page during an entire school year. Our method showed high degree of accuracy and is also capable of describing which topics are most common in each university's social media content strategy and relate them to the corresponding response from their publics.