Analysis of Top-Ranked HEI Publications’ Strategy on Twitter

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 strengthen their brand recognition. It is important for organizations to discover the true audience-aggregating themes resulting from their communication strategies, as it provides institutions with the ability to monitor their organizational positioning and identify opportunities and threats. In this work we create an automatic system capable of identifying HEI Twitter communication strategies. 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). Results show that there are different strategies, and most of HEI had to adapt them to the covid situation. The analysis also shows the prediction of topics and retweets for a HEI cannot just be based on recent historical data.