Social Media for Universities’ Strategic Communication : How Nigerian universities use Facebook

Abstract

A university has many stakeholders with varying interests and commitments. Several studies have examined modes and methods of HEIs communication with stakeholders. To the best of our knowledge, it is not evident in the literature how the engagement between universities and their stakeholders proceeds on the social media platforms particularly from a developing country perspective. This study employed stakeholder theory to give newer understanding to social media marketing as a strategy to reach university stakeholders and utilised an inductive, generic, qualitative approach in a netnography context to achieve the aim of this study. Theoretically, this chapter makes three key contributions. First, it extends the knowledge of the use of social media by universities, moving beyond the use of websites as strategic, interactive stakeholder engagement tools. Second, the study extends the application of stakeholder theory to include university conversations on social media, especially regarding the higher education institutions from a developing country perspective. Third, while acknowledging the unique and dynamic nature of stakeholders on social media, the study adopts a unique methodology to capture the usage of social media by the universities and explored their level of activity and analysed stakeholder responses. Methodologically, the study contributes to the literature on social media research.