SOCIAL MEDIA IN MARKETING MANAGEMENT OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS IN THE CONTEXT OF POLAND AND UKRAINE

Social media has become an essential element of communications in modern society. Accordingly, higher education institutions need to adapt their marketing management to modern realities, including social media usage in the marketing communication policy. Therefore, the purpose of the study focused on the research on social media usage in marketing management of higher education institutions is becoming more important. Unlike other researchers, the authors of the present study have conducted a representative survey of marketing managers of Polish and Ukrainian higher education institutions. They have assessed the level of social media usage and investigated the popularity of tools and forms for promoting higher education institutions in social networks. Methods of compiling and grouping data, analysing the structure of the population and its elements distribution and evaluating relationships were used to analyse the survey results. The authors revealed some significant similarities between the respondents' replies from Poland and Ukraine to prove the proposed hypotheses: marketing service managers of higher education institutions understand the important role of social media; higher education institution marketing managers use the same set of tools for promotion on social networks. The hypothesis that the priority directions of social media usage by marketing managers of higher education institutions are advertising educational services and maintaining contacts with students has not been fully confirmed. Management decisions of Polish higher education institutions primarily aim to attract international students, while Ukrainian institutions seek to establish and maintain contacts with students.