Information Seeking Behaviour of Aspiring Undergraduates on Social Media: Who Are They Interacting with?

In this paper we consider how aspiring undergraduates are utilising social media to meet their information needs during their application and transition into university. In particular, we ask who some of the prominent online actors are during this period. We want to know whether hopeful students are consulting social sources online, and if so, who these conversations are with, or, about. We use term frequency analysis to process a large sample (n = 494,180) of “tweets” (social media messages from Twitter) to determine who these main actors are. Our analyses provide insights into who students are interacting with during different stages of the decision-making process and, perhaps more importantly, who they are mostly failing to engage with. This leads us to a number of potentially useful conclusions and recommendations with regard to young people’s information behaviour on social media in the context of university admission.