Like, comment, and share the university experience: exploring the narratives present in Ontario universities' Instagram profiles

The main objective of this study was to explore the visual content and discourse present in three Ontario universities’ Instagram profiles, particularly their profiles dedicated to student recruitment and admissions. The study looked at the Instagram content published by top-three high application volume universities: McMaster University (macadmit), Ryerson University (whyryerson), and University of Toronto (futureuoft). The data collected was composed of photos, videos, and captions from all three universities from September 1, 2020 to December 31, 2020 inclusive. The results showed that visual assets highlighting the institution, portraits of students, and event/advertisements were the most occurring types of Instagram content. In addition, there was a high use of event/advertisement style in the accompanying captions. When the visual assets and captions were juxtaposed against each other, there was a high incongruence between the pairing which can be laborious for readers who will need to consolidate the visual and text information.