New trends constantly emerging on the Internet bring new ways of communication and dissemination of information. Social networks, which have been pre-sent on the Internet for more than 15 years, have lately become a topic of every day conversation, not only among individual users but also institutions. The spread of new technologies affecting even higher education institutions is wit- nessed by a considerable number of researches, papers and discussions about the use of social networks for educatio nal purposes. The key focus of this paper official presence of Croatian higher education institutions, both publicly and privately funded, on social networks. The presence of RSS feeds on web pages of academic institutions was also analysed. RSS was part of this research due to fact that it can be rather easily converted to content on social networks. This paper does not aim to analyse the use of soci al networks as educational tools. It rather focuses on the ways in which social networks can be used to upgrade the current means of communication within an academic community and between the general public and the academic community. The total of 170 intuitions was researched for the purpose of this paper. The gathering of data was conducted in two sessions. The first session was during the academic year of 2009/10 and the second session during the academic year of 2010/11. A comparison of these two data sets shows certain trends in the acceptance of social networks among the monitored intuitions. Additionally, a comparison of the adoption levels of social networks between publicly and priv ately funded institutions is given.