Customer Engagement with Universities’ Social Media after COVID-19: EaP Countries Case

Abstract

The current research aims at analyzing the social media activity of the universities in EaP countries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities had to transfer their education processes and enrollment campaigns online. University management had to introduce new tools for communication and interaction to ensure the efficacy of cooperation between the university community, students, teaching staff, and other stakeholders. In this research, the authors analyze which factors affected the dynamics and directions of customer engagement with Universities' social media and how. The authors propose a framework to reveal the role of countries’ digital environment, educational environment, and university’s SM activity in increasing ER of university stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic on Facebook and Instagram. The authors outline managerial proposals for universities, including analytics-based SM content creation and planning, communicating socially essential issues.

Does culture influence online customer engagement of university stakeholders: pandemic perspective

“…We then analyze the level of audience engagement with the universities' social media pages -Facebook and Instagram, as they are the most widely used in the EaP countries (Chala et al, 2021). We use Popsters.com to extract data on Engagement Rate per day (ER day) and Engagement Rate per post (ER post) for two periods:…”

“…The university ER rank increases by 1 point if ER for a SM page demonstrates a negative dynamic and by 2 points if it shows a positive dynamic. Methodology for calculating university ER ranks and data for each university are given in Chala et al (2021).…”

“…The current research takes into consideration data of the Social Media (SM) activity of the most influential universities in the EaP countries, presented in the InfluenceRanking (Academic Influence, 2021) and continues the series of publications on the influence of the pandemic on universities' SM activity and stakeholders' engagement (Chala et al, 2021;Khrapkina & Pichyk, 2022, pp. 260-270).…”

“…260-270). You can find the full list of the universities in question and their social media pages in Chala et al (2021).…”