Deciphering the Social Media Content to Identify Common Branding Themes of Bellwether Management Institutions of India

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Social media has become an integral part of people’s lives. Extant research is full of ample evidence on the impact of social media on the brand image and purchase intentions of consumers. Educational institutions have started using social media for passing information and influencing the attitudes of prospective students. There is a dearth of research on the type of content that can be used on social media to build the desired brand image as well as influence the attitude of prospective students. This study has an objective of identifying the common themes of social media content that are used by the leading IIMs, that is, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore and IIM Calcutta. Additionally, another aim is to find the themes that drive maximum engagement. Data was extracted from Facebook and Instagram posts of IIM Ahmedabad, Bangalore and Calcutta for a period of 8 months (i.e., January 2022 to August 2022). The posts were categorized on the basis of commonality and were given a common theme for analysis. Simple descriptive statistics was used to analyse the data. Frequency and mean were used to identify the most popular themes and correlation was used to find the relationship between the number of posts and engagement. Text analysis was also done using word cloud. On the basis of the post content and most frequently used words on all three platforms, word cloud was built for the three institutions. It was found that the most engaging themes on Facebook were achievements, webinars, festival celebrations, public talks by experts and appreciation posts. Similarly, the most engaging themes on Instagram were university infrastructure, webinars, achievements, cultural events and festival celebrations, Furthermore, the most engaging themes on LinkedIn were farewell, inauguration, festival celebration, social events and virtual meetings. The results of this study will contribute to the extant literature on what branding themes can be used by educational institutions on social media platforms to maximize engagement.