Canadian institutions of higher education use Twitter nearly universally. Yet, little research examines the narratives around college life constructed in their tweets. In this research, we used data mining and thematic analysis methods to examine this issue. Findings suggest institutions construct overwhelmingly positive representations that are incomplete and potentially misleading.

1. CSSHE, May 2016
Calgary, AB
Successful, sunny, and smiling:
The misleading ways that student life
and faculty are represented through
Canadian university Twitter accounts
George Veletsianos, Royce Kimmons, Ashley Shaw
Royal Roads University, Brigham Young University, University of British Columbia

2. Takeaway
The reality according to images
posted on Twitter: Happy
students and successful faculty
partake in engaging activities in
beautiful buildings and
captivating outdoor
environments.

3. Digital Technologies are
pervasive in Canadian
Universities

4. Social Media
Twitter = a mainstream
communication platform within
higher education institutions in
Canada

5. Paucity of empirical research
into the ways Canadian
universities are using Twitter and
the messages they convey
through it.

6. Past literature suggests that US,
European, and Australian
universities use Twitter
• in limited ways
• as a broadcast medium
• to market the university

7. One Canadian-focused study:
Bélanger, Bali, and Longden
(2014)
à majority of institutions used
Twitter for one-way marketing

8. RQ: What narratives do
institutional Twitter accounts
construct for university life and
faculty?

9. Methods
• Gather a list of university websites
• Create crawler to scan for Twitter
accounts (77)
• Use Twitter API to retrieve latest 3,500
tweets
• Create a script to identify all tweets
that included links to visual media
such as gif, jpg, youtube (274)

10. Methods
Two researchers used thematic analysis
to categorize visual media on five
dimensions (Mendelson & Papacharissi,
2010):
participants, content, setting, message,
and code

11. Results
Three themes:
Positive experiences
Attractiveness of the campus
Successes

12. Implications
Troubling.
Authentic, but incomplete & possibly
misleading representations.
Institutional social media accounts =
missed opportunities for community
learning & enhancement?

13. Thank you!
Research available at:
http://www.veletsianos/
publications
This presentation:
www.slideshare.com/
veletsianos
Contact:
veletsianos@gmail.com
@veletsianos on Twitter