  Social media has become something that is important to enhance social
networking and sharing of information through the website. Social media have
not only changed social networking, they provide a valuable tool for social
organization, activism, political, healthcare and even academic relations in
the university. The researchers conducted present study with objectives to a).
examine the academic use of social media by universities, b). measure the
popularity and visibility of social media owned by universities. This study was
delimited to the universities in Indonesia. The population of the study
consisted both on public and private universities. The sample size comprised
totally of 264 universities that their ranks included both in Webometrics and
4ICU in July 2012 edition. The social media which was examined included
Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, LinkedIn, Youtube, Wikipeda, Blogs, social network
community owned by the university and Open Course Ware. This study used an
approach for data collection and measurement: by using Alexa and Majestic SEO.
Data analysis using the Pearson Chi-square for social media ownership that
using data ordinal and independent t test for examining effects of social media
on website popularity. The study revealed that majority of the social media
users used Facebook, then followed by Twitter. There are also most significant
differences for result of popularity by Alexa Rank and visibility by Majestic
SEO in universities whether used social media or no.
