The Role of Content Strategy in Social Media on Brand Post’s Popularity: A Case of Higher Education Institutions in Turkey

Abstract The highly competitive higher education market has turned to branding as a solution for dealing with today’s global challenges. One important tool of a sustainable brand strategy involves forming brand fan pages and attracting followers on social networking web sites. Implementing effective content strategy on brands’ fan pages can help to form and foster relationships with the target group. Thus the aim of this study is to understand the role that content strategy in social networking web sites plays in determining the popularity of brand posts’ created by leading higher education institutions in Turkey. Results indicate that the top ten higher education institutions in Turkey most commonly made posts representing the Text + image + link content type. The majority of posts to community members were created by the institutions themselves, involved university news and were primarily made on weekdays between noon and 18:00. Additionally, MANOVA analyses were conducted to investigate the role of various elements of content strategy on brand posts’ popularity. Results indicate that content type, content agility, content context, posting type, and posting day significantly impact the number of likes, shares and comments, which are indicators of brand posts’ popularity.