Social Media and Italian Universities: An Empirical Study on the Adoption and Use of Facebook, Twitter and Youtube

The aim of the paper is to investigate the use of social media by Italian universities as communication and relational tools. An analysis of the 95 Italian higher education institutions highlights how nearly half of the universities (51.6%) have an official presence on at least one social media. In particular, private institutions and small-medium size universities are those that are mostly embracing the relational potentialities of these participatory media. Finally, in order to evaluate the social media performances of the analyzed institutions, we introduce the 'university social media performance index' (USMPI).Implications for public relation research and practices are discussed.