Leveraging Social Media Marketing for Brand Performance among Ugandan Universities

This study examines the role of social media in enhancing brand performance through social media marketing among Universities in Uganda. The specific objectives of the study were; to critically examine the effect of text posts by universities and interactivity on the number of likes, shares and type of comments in Uganda; to examine the relationship between social media photo vividness of universities on the number of shares, comments and likes and to analyse the interactive effect of social media perceived brand valence on the number of likes, shares and comments. This study adopted the mixed methods critical realism research philosophy to collect data. The findings from this study indicate that there is a significant positive correlation between social media interactivity, valence, and vividness with brand performance in terms of likes, shares, and comments of universities in Uganda. The study offers potential strategies to facilitate social media engagement by universities through which real-time feedback about the services of the universities can be sought. Another important outcome from this study is the contribution to the scholarly debate about social media engagement by universities in trying to further reach out to their communities. The study concludes by throwing light on the role of social media in promoting university brands. While there are limitations associated with the proposed methodology, such as a lack of inclusion of other lower-level institutions, the study concludes that social media carries with it a strong opportunity to increase access to the masses from where university programmes can be advertised, alumni are kept in the network and university research is disseminated to the public