Social Media Academic Research

I recently found two published academic research articles relevant to social media and organizational communication and I wanted to share them with you all!
The first article I found is titled Serious social media: On the use of social media for improving students' adjustment to college. By: David C. DeAndrea, Nicole B. Ellison, Robert LaRose, Charles Steinfield, and Andrew Fiore.
This study reports on a "student-centered social media site designed to enhance students' perceptions of social support prior to their arrival on campus. Results indicated that site usage increased students' perceptions that they would have a diverse social support network during their first semester at college, even when controlling for other potent predictors". This article shows that social media networks do influence people and in this case the diversity in their community.


The second article I found was How sociable? An exploratory study of university brand visibility in social media. By: E. Botha, M. Farshid, and L. Pitt.
This study describes "a tool for collecting brand visibility information by looking at the visibility of various South African university brands and their relative positioning from a social media perspective". They found that the university and the brands "both have opportunities for those who manage these brands, and also threats to these institutions for taking a laissez fair attitude to social media in these times when social media are coming to dominate the Internet in particular and media in general". Social media is also used to see how much people are seeing certain brands. This study focused on one university but this study can be done across many universities.