Influence of Social Media Marketing on Higher Education Branding

The higher education sector in India has witnessed a remarkable growth in past few years, attracting large number of private players and thereby increasing the competition in the market. Like the businesses compete for talented workers and customers, universities and colleges are also fiercely competing for the talented prospective students and finding the methods to improve the conversion rate of accepted to enrolled students. The answer to this challenge faced by the universities is to build world class brands just like the smart businesses tend to do. Social media is being extensively used in higher education industry by students, researchers and the institutions. Social media provides a platform to the institutions to communicate to a wider audience and to increase its visibility. This paper proposes to empirically analyze the role of social media in higher education brand building. The study is conducted on four premier universities of North India and the results show that there is a positive influence of social media marketing in higher education branding.