Social Media Policies in UK Higher Education Institutions - An Overview

Social media has brought about a new communication landscape and this has far reaching implications for higher education and academic practice. With this comes a need for a sound governance structure, and this paper aims to investigate the prevalence and content of social media policies within the UK higher education environment. Governance documents from all publicly funded universities were gathered and analyzed for accessibility through readability statistics, and a thematic analysis of the content compared to the main themes from the current body of literature pertaining to social media policies. The results suggest that a large proportion of UK institutions lack an explicit social media governance document and those that do exist score reasonably high on the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and SMOG readability measures. The content suggests that whilst higher education institutions are providing guidance for use of social media at work, little direction is provided for the use of social media for work. The paper then concludes by considering issues for policy implementation within the UK higher education environment.