Students' Preferences in Visual Consumption on Instagram as the Basis for the University PR-strategy

Halyna Kravchenkova,Alina Kalashnikova,Serhii Shkrebets

doi:10.47577/tssj.v21i1.3701

Abstract

In the mediatized society, traditional institutions, specifically high school, are included into economic and communicational competition. They face the necessity to communicate with their publicities by new unfamiliar means, like Instagram, and sometimes fail this challenge because of poor strategy preparation. The present study addresses the issue of incongruity between the visual communication of a higher education organization (Karazin Kharkiv National University as the case) and its young audience’s preferences in visual consumption. To gain a deeper understanding of the real and potential students’ preferences, an online survey was conducted. Data analysis included distributions, means, factor and cluster analysis. As a result, we identified the favorite patterns of photos and their perception, segmented the audience on Instagram by practices of picture evaluation. All this allowed proposing the strategical recommendations for the University PR-strategy, which has already shown its effectiveness for Karazin University and is potentially implementable for any educational institution facing the same challenges

Highlights

Contemporary culture is often described as visual due to the excessive usage of visual imagery, which recently began to dominate the realm of social communication
The higher education institutions’ administrative and press departments are facing the necessity to answer, how can the Instagram mechanism and user habits affect PR communication, and how can one plan the measurable effect on a network that distributes predominantly visual content? In this paper, we present the research that was conducted to reveal the student’s audience preferences in visual stylistic and thematic of the Instagram content with the practical purpose to develop strategic recommendations for higher education institutions’ communication by this social media
Discussion & conclusions The visual content one consumes shapes the taste for further perception

Summary

Introduction

Contemporary culture is often described as visual due to the excessive usage of visual imagery, which recently began to dominate the realm of social communication. As digital communication technologies spread our lives, the everyday informational space became packed with the visual imagery supplied by them, making its addressees both more used and more sensitive to it. These processes conjunction led to the Instagram social network popularity surge. The favorites change in verbal vs visual communication race poses a challenge for the modern PR-subjects

Objectives

Results

Conclusion