Growth of business schools on social media: A comparative analysis with focus on IBA Karachi

Authors

Erum Hafeez Aslam, Institute of Business Administration, Pakistan

Abstract

When the Institute of Business Administration Karachi established a presence on various social media platforms in 2009, its audience and followers grew dramatically. Face book, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn all proved to be useful tools to disseminate information for its target audience including prospective and current students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and industry. By 2012, however, social media activity became somewhat stagnant, as it was observed that content on various interfaces, although informative, lacked engagement and interaction with the audience. After several months of close monitoring, a number of issues were identified; for example, content only consisted of program and event announcements; slow response time to queries; lack of posts that would attract foreign audiences; and immense need to monitor the pages for removal of garbage material. It was then decided that a comprehensive Social Media Strategy should be developed with the primary goal of increasing the visibility of IBA on all its current social media platforms in order to attract more talented students and high caliber faculty. IBA’s Social Media Strategy is based on four key design principles viz., Listen, Engage, Interact and Inform its audience, with content being the most important driver for the success of Social Media. IBA’s Social media metrics indicate that the strategy has been successful to an extent, with the number of ‘Likes’ on the Face book page and posted content showing a rise, along with an increase in the number of comments, reviews, queries, Facebook visits, YouTube views, followers on Twitter, re-tweets and Talking About. However, comparison with other leading business schools in Pakistan and overseas indicates that IBA still lags behind. One of the strengths of IBA is its 27 highly active student societies and numerous academic departments, which, if properly engaged, could provide a constant stream of high quality, student generated content.

Keywords

ICT social networking, Digital media, Business schools, Content, Target audience, Strategy

DOI

https://doi.org/10.54784/1990-6587.1278

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Recommended Citation

Aslam, E. H. (2014). Growth of business schools on social media: A comparative analysis with focus on IBA Karachi. Business Review, 9(2), 158-175. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.54784/1990-6587.1278