Marketing your Business School on Social Media: Analyzing Social Media Content for Adopting the Right Strategies

Many Indian Business Schools and higher educational institutions have realized the importance of social media and the interactions in the social media platforms for branding their institution. Higher education institutions, specifically Indian Business Schools (B Schools) have been using the social media as a platform to connect to the prospective students, employers and alumni. With growing competition it has become imperative for Indian B Schools to use social media and communicate with all stake holders. For many Indian B Schools updating and maintaining the social media channels has become one of the most important digital marketing activity. Statista Research reveals the India takes the first place with 300 million users on Facebook and in the second position with 210 million Facebook users is the United States of America. Hence Indian B schools use Facebook as one of their important social media platform to build their identity and also to connect and communicate with prospective aspirants. In this paper the authors have taken posts from Facebook of renowned Indian B Schools. The format used and the topic of the posts have been taken from the Facebook pages of top 100 Indian B Schools. The B school were selected by considering National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) developed by Ministry of Human Resource Development Government of India-India Rankings 2018 under Management category. The total posts that have been taken for the study is 19612. All the posts that were posted on the Facebook from May 2018 to January 2019 were included. The authors have analyzed the content to find the topics and format that increases the engagement and those that do not. This paper provides some strategies on how Indian B Schools can run their social media campaigns, with specific reference to Facebook posts, to better market their offering and also to increase organic reach of the posts.