Social Media as a Source for Decision-Making among Students of Independent High-Education Institutions

Abstract

Research Question (RQ): Social media are offering tools for cost effective and interactive communication among students and independent high-educations institutions. For the schools it is important to know, what is the behavior of potential students on social media, how often do they use them, what kind of content do they share, how trustworthy social media are, when they search for different schools and share a content, connected to study.

Purpose: Concerning the importance of social media as a source of information for decision-making among students of independents high-education schools we talked to 18 students of master study at Faculty of Business Studies and high education students of Business Informatics at Ljubljana School of Business.

Method: We used a method of structured interviews among students, who are active on social networks.

Results: The answers are showing currently pretty modest influence of social media on decision-making process among students, who are very critical to the usage of social media in this process. The main source of information for the students are official web sites of the schools, surprisingly important are personal connections with the school administrative staff, where kind and open communication of staff is according to the answers very important. Concerning the reliability of social media as a source of information, they are not seen as a trustworthy source, probably also because it is possible to check most of the schools personally.

Organization: Management of different schools cannot afford not to follow the trends in social media. Broader segmentation of potential students should be consider, because the way, how millennia’s are using social media is different than the Y generation, for example. More than cost of the programme and the curriculum on a long run the user experience is more important. Younger students are expecting more information on school events, relations, especially lecturers to students, what is the spirit in the school, etc. It is important to build a school brand on social media, namely a digital school brand.

Society: Due to interactivity of social networks schools have less control over communication, concerning the content of messages, time of communication, especially with the potential students, who have not established any contacts with the school yet. Possible vulnerability due to the lack of control can be avoided with the strong digital brand of the school, which demands investments in knowledge and people.

Orginality: This is one of the first researches in Slovenia, how and on a basis of what information the potential students of independent high-education schools are selecting the school.

Limitations/Future Research: Due to the sample, which is not representative, it is difficult to generalize the results. We discussed only with Slovenia students, no foreigners were included. Besides we included only two independent high-education institutions and we talked to the ones, who already made the selection process. The future research should include the development of digital communication strategies, especially because social media are changing their algorithms very often and of the way, which can be followed by an average administrator very difficulty. We do not know enough, what is the influence of paid and so-called “organic” content, generated by the users.