Radicalising the marketing of higher education: learning from student-generated social media data

ABSTRACT

The social media landscape creates opportunities for higher education institutions (HEIs) to amplify psychological engagement with students and to increase influence impressions by following student(s)-to-student(s) conversations and stories. Evidence of understanding how HEIs can utilise student-generated social media data for higher education marketing and branding purposes is underexplored. This paper adopts a netnographic research method to illustrate how social media artefacts, such as the ‘This Is Where I Study’ (TIWIS) Facebook page, created by students in the form of dialogues and content can be analysed by HEIs to listen, engage further and influence students’ impressions. TIWIS illustrates that students’ engagement with social media platforms such as Facebook is dynamic in nature. It comprises behavioural expressions (manifestations and actions such as likes and shares as well as opinion comments) and individuals’ experiences (subjective in nature stories and comments of personal experiences and views). Hence, netnographic analysis allows capturing actual behaviours via longitudinal ‘big data’ sets and supports HEIs in proactive branding. Analysis of social media data demonstrates the value of encouraging and making accessible authentic conversations in order to create student-centred content.

KEYWORDS:

• Marketing of higher education
• social media marketing
• netnographic study
• social media listening

Acknowledgements

We would love to thank Bournemouth University for initiating and supporting the TIWIS project and Dr Chindu Sreedharan for leading the TIWIS project and journalism student teams.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elvira Bolat

Dr Elvira Bolat is a senior lecturer in marketing at the Faculty of Management, Bournemouth University. Her teaching covers courses on both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Her research interests cover a digitisation of small- and medium-sized firms and its effect on service innovations practices as well as digital transformation of learning and higher education. She has an extensive track record in working on digital marketing in the Business to Business (B2B) Marketing research area, hence, Elvira is the acting Deputy Chair for the Academy of Marketing B2B Special Interest Group.

Helen O’Sullivan is a lecturer in marketing at Bournemouth University. After working as a broadcast journalist in Australia and the UK, she moved into the HE sector where she worked for 9 years as a marketing manager and head of school liaison. She has retained her interest in the sector as an academic, where the main focus of her research is branding in higher education, with particular focus on UK post-92 universities.