Getting Granular— Uncovering Actionable Insights for Effective Social Media Management in the Higher Education Sector

ABSTRACT

Current research reveals the importance social media use has on the marketing and branding efforts of nonprofit organizations. Particularly in higher education, scholarship shows the benefits of using social media to attract prospective students, facilitate alumni donations, and communicate with and support current students. However, within this context, limited attention has been paid to the actionable insights of the branding and outreach processes of social media professionals managing these accounts for higher educational institutions (HEIs). Therefore, this study attempts to uncover how specialists managing HEI social media accounts with high levels of engagement generate and leverage social media content using grounded theory methodology. The purpose of this inductive approach was to present the specific strategies and tactics associated with the management of top-performing HEI social media accounts in order to contribute to the construction of a set of best practices and meaningful actions that can be practically incorporated by marketing professionals in higher education as well as the nonprofit sector more broadly. Additionally, findings from this research are intended to build upon the extant literature that purports the value of HEIs using social media to support their communities but does not dig into the nuance of how social media management is executed.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media marketing
• higher education marketing
• social media strategy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Positions span a wide range of concentrations such as specialist, professional, coordinator, manager, etc; I will be using the term “professionals” to encompass all of them.

2. For the purposes of this study, I define engaging content as posts comprising written text, links, emoji, images, and/or videos that garner digital interactions (e.g., clicks, likes, shares, etc.) from individuals on social media.

3. IRB approval was procured from all participants.

4. I would like to highlight that this sampling procedure is limited and therefore results, as in all qualitative studies is limited in regard to generalizability. However, this well-adopted approach was followed in order to bolster transferability of the findings.

5. While all major geographic locations were represented, it should be noted that no universities were located in the “deep south.”

6. I define “pay to play as adjusting one’s content and/or strategy to get an algorithmic advantage, which includes both organic and paid for content.

7. This could have been due to Fran’s position within the academically focused Research and Communications department.