Adopting Social Media for Stakeholder Engagement: a case of UK HEI

Since 2015 the School of Business, Economics and Leadership at Staffordshire University (Business School) has used social media to engage with internal and external stakeholders. As platform use grew, external facing accounts featured in Edurank, which measures and reports rankings for Business School social media activity globally. Over a period of 6 months from August 2016 to February 2017, the School was placed within the top 5 Business Schools worldwide for social media activity.
Success in achieving the high rankings developed from an initiative to increase engagement with external stakeholders, demonstrating to students how social media can be used effectively for business engagement; a key employability tool. A case history for use of social media in academia, the paper draws upon analytics from both internal social media accounts and Edurank.
The strategy focused on creation of best practice, using the AIDA model overlaid with the 5S’s to structure activity and required academics to engage with social media; a challenge, as literature confirms that academics are laggards in the adoption of social media.
Edurank rankings and platform analytics evidence the success of the initiative, demonstrating how strategic planning of activity can enable organisations to communicate and engage with external stakeholders.