Effectiveness of Social Media as a Marketing Tool for Higher Education

With the advent of digital communications technologies and the World Wide Web as a connection medium, the way we live and do business has been tremendously changed, leading to the emergence of connected communities where people spent a significant amount of their time online. The traditional means of receiving news about the world we live in has also drifted from the Conventional Media (CM) towards the Social Media (SM). Hence, to let people know about the commercial products and services, social media must be integrated in the advertising and promotion campaigns. Many companies including Higher Education Institutes (HEI) complied with this general trend and moved major parts of their advertising and promotion campaigns to the SM. Universities have allocated a significant amount of their resources to advertising and promotion in the SM, creating a strong SM presence. However, the effectiveness of SM in reaching out to people from all around the globe to create university brand trust and brand identity that leads to student recruitment is still being questioned by higher education institutions. The widespread of messages bearing the HEI qualities and assets of attraction in SM could create and adverse effect on the potential students such that the students in far geographies who do not have the capacity to be genuine academic students to the target HEI could also be attracted by SM to make online applications to the available programs. This thesis focused on the effectiveness of social media as a marketing tool in student recruitment to universities. As a result of our measurements, we have shown that social media could influence student’s subjective norms and attitudes but could not change student’s intention to register to the university. Keywords: Social media, brand, trust, identification, student recruitment, international university, subjective norms, attitudes.