Social media have become a widely used tool to communicate with the orgnisations stakeholders. Institutions of higher learning are also venturing into this new way of marketing and communication. This study intended to determine how South African institutions of higher learning are using social media for marketing and communication purposes. Firstly, a literature study was conducted to gain an understanding on how social media are used. Further an empirical study was conducted, which consisted of two phases. The first phase was a case study on NMMU and Stellenbosch University. Structured-interviews, focus groups and observation were used to collect data from the cases. The collected data were then used to construct a questionnaire that was used for a survey. The survey was distributed to all 23 universities, 50 public FET colleges and the 200 private FET college. 92 institutions responded to the survey. The findings prove that there are various opportuntities and challenges in using social media although it should be stressed that the opportunities outweigh the threats. There is no visible difference between colleges social media implementation in relation to institutions of higher learning. Most institutions use more than one social media tool. Facebook is the most widely used social media followed by Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn. Flickr, MXit, Google+ and Blog are the least used social media. The observations of the NMMU and Stellenbosch University show that these two institutions are striving to engage with their target audiences. Although the institutions are using social media, some of the concerns are that institutions are not measuring their social media use. For those who are measuring, most depend on the free measurement tools which focus only on the quantitative measure. The governance of the social media use is none existent. Most respondents stated that they do not have a policy or guidelines informing social media management. Most of the respondents felt that they want to use more social media tools in future although some of the challenges alluded to were lack of capacity, human resources and budget.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:nmmu/vital:8821 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Mangolothi, Brightness |
| Publisher | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, Faculty of Business and Economic Sciences |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Masters, MBA |
| Format | x, 216 leaves, pdf |
| Rights | Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University |
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