Eureka! Institutional Repository

Social media is becoming increasingly important in all areas of people's daily lives, as they provide many opportunities and challenges. The new conditions make information search, exchange of views and interaction ongoing. Organizations and businesses seem to use them, reaping multiple benefits, mainly in promoting their public relations. Even in the field of education, provided that appropriate conditions are ensured, teachers have the opportunity to use social media in their teaching so that they can develop the processes of organizing and achieving learning. Thus, students can be assured of more active learning as well as acquiring the necessary skills for their subsequent course. Likewise, regarding to relationships, there is an urgent need for educational units to utilize social media in order to actively involve stakeholders in school life. In this way, a better functioning of each school unit can be achieved, but also a better performance by the students. In this research, 260 American and Greek public and private secondary schools were studied for how they use their facebook pages to be promoted, communicate and develop relationships with their audiences. Comparisons between them revealed several significant differences in the way each type of school approaches and utilizes the opportunities offered by social media. According to the results, it appeared that Greek schools, especially public schools, are not fully exploiting the opportunities offered by facebook, as they are mainly limited to displaying information and thus one-way communication. On the other hand, American schools seem to seek more of a two-way interactive communication with their public.