Social Media and Higher Education: Students Preferences Towards Choice of Institute

Any organization having public and social constituency and has multiple stakeholders, needs public relations. Social media sites provide a distinctive technology to communicate which creates more opportunities and relationship building between various stakeholders of institution and public. The technology transformation is changing the ways students collaborate, communicate and learn. The first ways, prospective students interact with higher education institute is through social networking sites. Students are also drifting away from conventional communication mode and believing more in social media communication. Social media offers immense opportunity to higher education institutes to expand and reach students in compliment to existing methods. Higher Educational institutes are also using social media as it offers direct contact with students. They are using social media to communicate many types of contents to engage students. From the aforesaid discussions we can apprise that social media use is extensive by higher education institutes and students. Institutes and students are using social media for various purposes like marketing and student recruitment, student support, alumni communication, information dissemination about college, student learning for improved academic outcomes, building students’ communities and involving students in campus life, enhancing students’ social life and strengthening student to student interaction etc. Despite abundance of studies on popularity and use of social media there is little research on role and value of social media. This void in research may be due to the complexity to measure and assess the role of social media due to anonymity of users. Unless the student explicitly tells the role of social has influenced his/her decision. It is also difficult to measure the strength of causality between social media and quantitative outcomes. In present study, it was tried to study the relationship between demographic profile of students and their preference in joining social media page of higer education institute (HEI) and preference for a course and institute using chi-square (χ2) test of independence. The results showed that invites from friends and peer groups make students join social media page of institute or course. The reason for joining the social media page is for information purposes. Students make their own decision in selection of choice of course and institute and placements prospects strengthen their decision in making selection. The results of the study will help higher education institutes to reach prospective students in developing an engaging and effective social media presence and make them enroll the institute and course.