The impact of the online presence on the Twitter accounts of the Basque and Navarre universities

Abstract

The universities have needed to adapt to the new models of communication that the Internet era has brought. Within these new models the social media have appeared and Twitter has established itself as one of the most important social network sites. The purpose of the present study is to show whether the online presence defined by information available on Internet of a university, and its Twitter account are related. To test this idea, a correlation analysis between the online presence of the five Basque and Navarre universities and their official Twitter profiles was conducted. The results indicated a significant direct correlation between the online presence of the Institutions and the number of followers of each account respectively. Furthermore, a second hypothesis was formulated in order to confirm whether having several Twitter accounts would increase the online presence of these universities. A strong and statistically significant correlation between having several Twitter accounts and the increase of the online presence of these universities was found. These results demonstrate the importance of the online presence to the Twitter accounts and the relevance of Twitter to increase the online presence of the universities.