The Use of Social Networking by Higher Education Institutions in Spain: A Comparative Analysis Employing the Facebook Assessment Index (FAI)

The objective of this study was to analyse the use Spanish universities are making of the main social network today: Facebook. The research adapts to the Higher Education Institutions context an evaluation index denominated FAI that has been used in other areas. It applies the index to all of Spain's universities, making comparisons between them and the best universities in the world. The results show that Spanish universities' indices are far from the values obtained by the best international universities, and that the country's private universities have better results than the public ones. It is an intention of the work to contribute to the tools the marketing managers of higher education institutions might use in how they relate to social networks and to the opportunities and threats these pose.