Abstracts Economics

Conteúdo digital para instituições de ensino superior: o caso da Escola de Economia e Gestão da Universidade do Minho: Digital content for higher education institutions: the case of the School of Economics and Management of the University of Minho

by Bárbara Micaela Dias Silva

There has been a period of significant transformation in higher education around the globe, including Portugal (Ruão, 2005). In fact, academic institutions have been suffering from enormous pressure due to intense competition, given that there has been a considerable growth in educational offer. This fact poses a massive challenge for universities as they have to continuously improve their services and promote them in order to attract their target audience. Taking into consideration the present situation, universities have come to the conclusion that they need a distinctive element which is, hence, their competitive advantage. Nevertheless, to strengthen that advantage, it becomes necessary to communicate it. Therefore, Higher Education Institutions have recognised the need to implement marketing practices, namely content marketing, to compete successfully in national and international markets. Thus, the present study aims to understand the digital context of universities in their social networks. In order to carry out this project, the School of Economics and Management, University of Minho, was used as a case study through the completion of a curricular internship. In this sense, it seeks to understand the School's communicative needs and define the content strategies to be adopted in the social networks. With the purpose of addressing these issues, a set of methodological procedures have been incorporated into a global benchmarking methodology applied to the Higher Education sector at national and international level. The posts collected on social networks from reference universities guided the qualitative analysis that was based on the editorial model of Oliveira and Figueira (2015), and allowed the development of analyses aimed at answering the research questions, in particular: the messages' content analysis published on the social networks and their engagement with the followers. The results reveal a pattern of sharing content more frequently used and generator of greater engagement involving topics such as "Relationship," "Society," and "Identity," as well as the discovery of new editorial areas relevant for universities' communication strategies.