Students engage more when university social media builds belonging
Updated Jul 14, 2026
Universities often treat social media as a broadcast channel. Students experience it more like a service touchpoint that can either clarify belonging or make the institution feel distant. That is why the recent Journal of Further and Higher Education paper by Ardy Wibowo, Shih-Chih Chen and Athapol Ruangkanjanases, "Leveraging social media for enhanced student engagement in higher education: a service-dominant logic perspective", matters for teams using student voice to understand the student experience. Based on survey data from 987 current students, the study shows that better information quality and more effective digital interaction can strengthen perceived value, deepen belonging, and increase engagement.
Context and research question
Most UK universities now use social media for far more than recruitment. It sits inside induction, wellbeing messaging, timetable changes, campus life, student support, and day-to-day course communication. That creates a practical question for Student Experience and Market Insights teams: when students encounter the institution through these channels, does that contact help them feel informed and connected, or simply marketed at?
This paper asks that question directly. Using service-dominant logic as its frame, the study examines whether universities' social media activity can improve student engagement and attitudes towards the institution. The authors collected data from 987 current students and analysed it using partial least squares structural equation modelling, which makes the paper especially useful for teams trying to understand how communication quality, belonging, and engagement fit together rather than treating them as separate issues.
Key findings
The clearest finding is that channel quality matters more than channel presence alone. The paper found that perceived aesthetics and information quality strengthened students' views of institutional social media activity. For UK higher education teams, that means activity by itself is not the point. Students respond when digital communication looks coherent, feels credible, and answers practical questions well.
Belonging sits at the centre of the model, not at the margins. Better social media activity increased students' perceived value and their sense of belonging to what the paper calls a brand community. In higher education terms, that is less about marketing language and more about whether students feel connected to a recognisable, responsive institutional community. That is close to the tension highlighted in post-pandemic evidence on flexibility and belonging: digital convenience can help, but connection still has to be designed.
The abstract's practical emphasis is worth noting:
"The findings highlight the significance of proactive and interactive customer service strategies on social media."
Student experience and engagement moved together, but outward participation depended on behaviour. The abstract reports that behavioural engagement mediated the link between student experience and two later outcomes: co-creation behaviour and electronic word-of-mouth. In practice, students are more likely to contribute, participate, and speak positively about the institution when digital contact already feels useful and relational.
The broader point is that universities should treat social media as service delivery, not only promotion. That is why the service-dominant logic framing matters. The paper positions university social media as part of the student experience itself, not just a wrapper around it. For UK teams, that is a useful shift because frustrations about communication, clarity, and institutional tone often surface first in comments before they appear in headline metrics.
Practical implications
For UK higher education teams, the first implication is to audit institutional social media through a student-experience lens. Ask not only whether students follow a channel, but whether the content is timely, useful, and easy to act on. Add open-text prompts to induction, support, or pulse surveys so students can describe where digital communication helps and where it creates noise, a point that fits wider evidence on making academic communication more predictable. This gives teams clearer evidence of which touchpoints build trust and which simply add volume.
Second, universities should track belonging and information quality together. A polished feed is not enough if students still feel unsure, peripheral, or overloaded. Pair scaled items with open comments so teams can see whether institutional channels are actually strengthening connection, especially if they want to benchmark or track change over time, because belonging evidence is weaker when it relies on a score alone. The benefit is a stronger basis for decisions about digital engagement rather than a superficial channel review.
Third, institutions should treat digital engagement comments as operational evidence, not side noise. This is where Student Voice Analytics fits naturally: it can group repeated signals about clarity, responsiveness, belonging, and online community across large comment sets instead of leaving teams with scattered remarks from different surveys and feedback routes. That gives communications, student experience, and insights teams a clearer starting point for targeted improvements to the channels students actually use.
FAQ
Q: How should a university apply these findings without turning social media into a marketing exercise?
A: Start with student journeys, not campaigns. Review where students rely on social channels for practical information, reassurance, or connection during induction, assessment periods, and support moments. Then ask a small number of focused questions about usefulness, clarity, and belonging, and use comments to see where messages are helping or confusing students.
Q: What are the methodological limits of this study?
A: The paper is based on survey data from 987 current students and uses PLS-SEM to test relationships between constructs. That makes it useful for spotting patterns, but it is still correlational, not an experimental test of causation. The abstract also does not present a UK-specific sample, so British universities should treat the findings as transferable practice evidence rather than as a direct benchmark for the sector.
Q: What does this change about student voice work more broadly?
A: It widens what counts as student experience evidence. Universities often separate communications, belonging, and feedback into different workstreams, but students do not experience them separately. Open comments are useful here because they show whether digital communication feels informative, supportive, and community-building, or whether it simply adds another layer of institutional noise.
References
[Paper Source]: Ardy Wibowo, Shih-Chih Chen, Athapol Ruangkanjanases "Leveraging social media for enhanced student engagement in higher education: a service-dominant logic perspective" DOI: 10.1080/0309877x.2026.2695353
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