How universities can use social media for student acquisition

Abstract

Higher education institutions face increasing pressure to promote their complex services in competitive global markets, yet they lack evidence-based insights into effective marketing communication strategies. Drawing on signaling theory, the current research examines how universities’ social media content influences student acquisition. Based on interviews with university social media managers, text analyses of more than 1 million tweets from 94 U.K. universities, and two experiments, we outline how universities’ communication content and style choices drive student acquisition. Rather than content focused on the service environment or outcome quality, the study findings indicate that content pertaining to interaction quality has the strongest positive effect on acquisition. Stylistically, an emotional tone enhances the impact of such content, but a cognitive tone is more effective for content about outcome quality; the tone has no significant effect on content about the service environment. Furthermore, external signals offered by third-party rankings moderate these effects: Highly ranked institutions benefit most when they signal environment quality, whereas lower-ranked institutions benefit from emphasizing interaction quality. With such strategic guidance, universities can align their social media content and style and third-party quality signals to optimize student acquisition.