Brand Communities on Instagram: Study of the Strategies of the World?s Best Universities

Social media, including Instagram, favor the construction of university communities beyond the campus due to their audiovisual nature and con-solidation as communication tools in the educational field. Thus, the main objective is to analyze the strategies implemented on the platform by the top five world universities according to the Shanghai Ranking to determine the actions aimed at promoting an intentional community and assess the impact caused by them in the real-life community. For this research, a quan-titative and qualitative methodology was chosen, performing an impact analysis of the profiles using the Fanpage Karma tool and a content analysis of the semiotics of discourse with Excel and SPSS statistical software. We examined 394 posts by the Universities of Harvard, Stanford, Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and California Berkeley be-tween September 1 and December 31, 2021, the first three months of the academic year typical to the United States and the United Kingdom. The results show a non-proportional relationship between post frequency and impact and the existence of shared semiotic variables on which the mes-sage is based. However, a dichotomy is found between the actions of North American universities and the British one, reflecting the influence of idio-syncratic factors on the design of social media strategy.