Social Media Marketing: analysis and application to the Specializing Masters Programs and Lifelong Learning School of Polytechnic of Turin

An introduction is given on digital marketing to have a general view about how Business Schools and, in general, all firms can promote their activities online, as social media marketing, in fact, is just a part of the tools that can be used for the online promotion. The scope of this work is to understand, starting from real data, how Schools of Masters promote their educational programs online and how they use social media for this purpose in order to apply the tools that, from the analysis, result effective to the Specializing Masters Programs and Lifelong Learning School of Polytechnic of Turin. The objective is to understand what are the elements that positively or negatively influence the engagement, brand awareness and word of mouth of a post of a school of masters on social media. The data used in the analysis were collected from the Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn social media pages of some Italian Business School, specifically Luiss Business School, MIP, SDA Bocconi and Cuoa Business School. A total of 1407 posts were collected, considering a three months’ time frame. The metrics that were used in order to evaluate engagement, brand awareness and word of mouth were the number of followers of the social page, number of likes and of comments, number of views in case of videos and the reshares on Facebook, as suggested by literature. The analysis was carried out using graphs, descriptive statistics and linear regression models, developed using the software SPSS. The results obtained allowed to see the differences in the tone of voice and contents published among social media, which of them performs better in relation to the metrics considered, and what type of contents are more effective. The outcomes were used to define a set of actions that should be implemented by the Specializing Masters Programs and Lifelong Learning School of Polytechnic of Turin in order to increase and improve its use of social media for the promotion of its educational programs.