Investigating public universities facebook Pages: Extent of users engagement

Abstract

The development in information technologies have made higher learning institutions to change the way they communicate with their audiences. For instance social media such as face book, tweeter and you tube have been used to communicate with current and prospective students. This study was conducted to investigate the engagement of the facebook pages of public universities in Tanzania. Specifically, the study determined the popularity of the pages, extent to which users put comments upon the posts as well as virality of the messages/posts on the walls. The analysis of the metrics such as popularity, commitment and virality was done to study three Tanzanian public university facebook pages. It was revealed that, the most popular page was SUZA 97.3%followed by UDOM 90.7%, then OUT 71.1%. The study further found that, UDOM facebook page had many comments 81%, followed by SUZA 69.3% then OUT which was below average. The extent to which information were shared in all institutions were below average. This was 41.2%, 1.2% and 4.8% for UDOM, OUT and SUZA respectively.