  Social media based indicators or altmetrics have been under scrutiny for the
last seven years. Their promise as alternative metrics for measuring scholarly
impact is still far from becoming a reality. Up to now, most studies have
focused on the understanding of the nature and relation of altmetric indicators
with citation data. Few papers have analysed research profiles based on
altmetric data. Most of these have related to researcher profiles and the
expansion of these tools among researchers. This paper aims at exploring the
coverage of the Altmetric.com database and its potential use in order to show
universities' research profiles in relationship with other databases. We
analyse a sample of four different Spanish universities.First, we observe a low
coverage of altmetric indicators with only 36 percent of all documents
retrieved from the Web of Science having an 'altmetric' score. Second, we
observe that for the four universities analysed, the area of Science shows
higher 'altmetric' scores that the rest of the research areas. Finally,
considering the low coverage of altmetric data at the institutional level, it
could be interesting for research policy makers to consider the development of
guidelines and best practices guides to ensure that researchers disseminate
adequately their research findings through social media.
