MARKETING COMMUNICATION ADVANCEMENT APPROACHES ON SOCIAL MEDIA FOR UNIVERSITIES IN PATHUM THANI

Abstract

          The objective of this research was to study the demand of Universities’ news consumption on Social Media of university students. Samples were of 400 university students in Pathum Thani who were already online users. Data was collected by survey questionnaire. Data analysis employed percentage, mean and standard deviation. The research hypotheses were tested by T-test, One-way ANOVA and Pearson Correlation Analysis. Research findings indicated the high demand in social media usage of students for academic purpose such as contacting with their lecturer, keeping up with the bulletin board as well as with the registration and evaluation was high. For non-academic purpose, they used social media for exchanging opinion, building network within the university, follow up with news and activities as well as approaching the top executives. The Facebook is the most popular channel. The Smartphone was used to connect social media. The Social media access was during 15:01-18:00. Although they followed 5-6 university Facebook Fanpages, they were still confused with information that the pages presented.          Hypotheses testing indicated that the demand for social media usage of academic purposes in terms of “keeping up with the university movement” and “keeping with the academic information” had correlation with social media news consumption behavior of university students with coefficient (r) as of 0.81 and 0.52. In the meantime, the demand for social media usage of non-academic purposes “keeping up with the university movement”, “keeping with additional activity updates” and “connecting with friends with the university” had correlation with social media news consumption behavior of university students with coefficient (r) as of 0.22, 0.68 and 0.13 at the statistical significance as of 0.05.