Social Media in Higher Education: A Framework for Continuous Engagement

Introduction

Social media has emerged as a powerful medium of communication across the globe and its extensive use has changed the way, people communicate and interact online. Social media channels include the social networking sites, blogs, vlogs, instant messaging, and virtual communities. Beyond the boundaries of personal communication, social media is also redefining the ways in which organizations are reaching their audiences and communicating with the individuals (Hendricks & Schill, 2015). It has become an integral part of the strategies of almost all industrial sectors, and higher education institutes are also prioritizing social media to connect to a large audience. This can also be attributed to the fact that social media has become the primary means of interaction within the world for younger generation, and this young generation is the primary audience for the higher education institutions. According to 2017 statistics, the average time spent by millennial users (people born after 1980) worldwide on mobile internet is 223 minutes per day, which has actually got doubled from 2012 to 2017 (Statista, 2017). This proves a strong dependence of young people on the internet as part of their daily line.

Higher Education environment is also experiencing a period of great change (Bolat & Sullivan, 2017). Alterations in student tuition fees, de-regulation of student number controls, value for money, trends towards large-scale marketing and viewing the student as the consumer are a number of changes being observed in higher education (Scullion & Molesworth, 2016; Tomlinson, 2015).Correspondingly, the Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) are looking forward to new and effective tools for marketing and internet based tools and technologies can prove very much vital in this. Technology not only makes it easy to obtain information, but also allows people to interact through cyberspace (Kusumawati et al., 2014). Nayar and Kumar (2018) have argued that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) removes the big constraints of time and space in higher education and enables access on anytime and anywhere basis.With the rising prominence of social media in recent years, many promotional tools like traditional print and broadcast media have faced major challenges like timeliness, convenience and cost effectiveness. That is why, a large number of HEIs have also embraced some forms of social media for promotional purposes. Prior to introduction of social media, higher educational institutions relied primarily on websites as a basic environment for engagement due to the interactive nature of the web (Kang & Norton, 2006). Traditional marketing tactics have always facilitated one way communication; however, social media provides organizations with the opportunity to engage in two-way communications with their audiences. In this regard, social media has the ability to “…facilitate dialogue among groups that wouldn’t easily be in conversation with each other- current students, prospective students, alumni, parents, and friends of the college…” (Bednar, 2013).