Purpose: As one of the buzzwords in the present age with considerable impacts in tertiary institutions, social media use in online teaching, learning and information dissemination have been extensively discussed in extant literature. This paper aims to explore the existing campus sustainability appraisal (CSA) tools to identify the length at which social media has been used, especially in environmental sustainability indicators' selection and empirical verification. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology is mainly based on a desktop study involving comprehensive review and content analysis of existing CSA tools' documents. Webpage content analysis of selected sustainability monitoring and tracking system in higher education institutions was also conducted. Findings: The tools' content analysis reveals insufficient utilization of social media data and platforms in campus sustainability environmental-dimension indicators selection. To bridge this identified research gap, social media user-generated content for appraising the campus-wide environmental sustainability indicators preference in tertiary institutions was proposed. Practical implications: The adoption and modification of this study's proposed approach by tertiary institutions, especially in sub-Saharan African countries, could help address most campus-wide environmental challenges raised, commented on and discussed on social media. Originality/value: This study contributes to knowledge gaps by revealing the extent of social media utilization in extant tools. With the expanding utilization of different social media platforms by various tertiary institutions worldwide, their administrators' responsibility is to put these social media data into fair use.