Linking Universities to the Target Market via Web Sites: A Content Analysis of Turkish Private Universities’ Web Sites

Internet is becoming more and more important in business. It has many advantages such as reducing marketing costs and extending target group easier. Universities, which lead the scientific developments in a society, can also benefit from the Internet. Universities have different characteristics and audiences compared to corporations. With the new generation, Web sites become more crucial in order to meet and convince prospective students, who grew up with the Internet. From this point of view, Web sites should be up-to-date, fast, interactive and user friendly.The purpose of this study is to explore the current content information of the Turkish Private Universities’ (TPUs) Web sites. By July 2013, there are 71 TPUs, but only 61 of them have an avaliable Web site (The Council of Higher Education, 2013). The scale to assess content of the Web sites consists of 41 items and they are divided into 4 groups based on their target audience: (1) students/prospective students, (2) employees/prospective employees, (3) external stakeholders and (4) media. According to the findings, the arithmetic mean of items for students/prospective students is moderately high with 58 percent score, employees/prospective employees is moderately high with 57 percent score, external stakeholders is moderate with 50.49 percent score and media is high with 81.42 percent score.