Social media have become a popular online platform for modern society, as they are simple and easy to use. The paper presents the content analysis of higher edu-cational establishments’ official web pages on Facebook and Instagram social nets as well as their promotional role in creating a definite image of a school. A statistical measurement of the Internet audience, research on topics of posts on of-ficial pages of higher educational institutions, format of information submission, features of work with an audience - all these characteristics allow to reveal indica-tors of data management effectiveness. On the one hand, the article reveals the ranking of the top universities on Facebook with the reference to objective statis-tic data (Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and the National Auton-omous University of Mexico) and, on the other hand, the web pages of Harvard University, the University of Oxford and Stanford University are analyzed on In-stagram. Such research permits to generalize the experience of foreign countries to project web pages of universities as an optimal way to make them popular in the open online academic space and to provide effective feedback.