Abstract
In recent years we have seen a large adherence to social media by various Higher Education Institutions (HEI) with the intent of reaching their target audiences and improve their public image. These institutional publications are guided by a specific editorial strategy, designed to help them better accomplish and fulfill their mission. The current Covid-19 pandemic has had major consequences in many different fields (political, economic, social, educational) beyond the spread of the disease itself. In this paper, we attempt to determine the impact of the pandemic on the HEI content strategies by gauging if these social-economical, cultural and psychological changes that occurred during this global catastrophe are actively reflected in their publications. Furthermore, we identified the topics that emerge from the pandemic situation checking the trend changes and the concept drift that many topics had. We gathered and analyzed more than 18k Twitter publications from 12 of the top HEI according to the 2019 Center for World University Rankings (CWUR). Utilizing machine learning techniques, and topic modeling, we determined the emergent content topics for each institution before, and during, the Covid-19 pandemic to uncover any significant differences in the strategies.
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Coelho, T., Figueira, A. (2021). Covid-19 Impact on Higher Education Institution’s Social Media Content Strategy. In: Gervasi, O., et al. Computational Science and Its Applications – ICCSA 2021. ICCSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12950. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86960-1_49
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86960-1_49
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