Promoting Green Brand of University in Social Media: Text Mining and Sentiment Analysis

Abstract

Combating climate change and mitigating its negative consequences requires enhancing awareness of sustainable development. It is believed the education sector is an excellent trigger for green transformations. In turn, since social media has become a fundamental part of people's everyday lives, they are considered to be an effective tool in engaging the broader audience to green problems. In this view, this paper aims to analyze the social media activity of world-leading green universities in gaining the university community's commitment to sustainable development principles. This study involved text mining, statistical, content, and sentiment analyses to achieve the study aim and answer the following research questions: 1) What is the social media performance of the green universities? 2) What is a difference in the social media parameters used by the green universities involving the academic community and stakeholders to account for environmental issues? The research objects are five top-ranked sustainable universities worldwide according to the UI GreenMetric World University Rankings in 2021 and Sumy State University (as the first Ukrainian university listed by the mentioned above ranking). The study period covers data as of May 10, 2022. The data was retrieved from the analyzed universities' social media sites (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, etc.). The findings confirmed the research hypothesis that the social media activity of green universities could be a driving force in gaining sustainable development goals and promoting an eco-friendly lifestyle worldwide. Based on the obtained results, the authors provided some recommendations regarding strengthening the universities’ social media activity towards increasing the green awareness of netizens.