ABSTRACT
The main objective of the study was to identify the opinions of different stakeholder groups (students, graduates, academic and administrative staff) on the social media activities of HEIs in Poland and the process of building trust in social media. A set of research tasks was adopted for its implementation: (1) review the literature on the use of social media by universities and the process of building trust in social media; (2) examine the frequency with which stakeholders visit their university’s official social media accounts; (3) identify which topics of posts/videos posted on the university’s official social media accounts are of greatest interest to stakeholders; and (4) identify which factors are most important for trust in social media used by universities. The following methods were used to obtain research material and present the obtained results: literature studies, diagnostic survey (with the use of the CAWI – computer-assisted web interview), descriptive, tabular and graphic. The research sample consisted of 270 people. The main finding of the study was that 78% of the research sample followed their universities on social media. The highest number of respondents used Facebook and Instagram together for this purpose (43%); the use of Facebook alone was declared by 38% of the people. When choosing a university social network, respondents were guided by the reliability of the information posted and the attractiveness of a given social network. Due to the fact that the conducted research was a pilot study, there is a need to continue it, preferably on a larger research sample.
