Predicting social media engagement in higher educational institutions: A machine learning approach

Bhattacharjee, Biplab ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3886-8409, Suresh, Sheena and Maiti, Moinak (2026) Predicting social media engagement in higher educational institutions: A machine learning approach. Journal of Digital Economy, 5. pp. 182-197. ISSN 27730670

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Abstract

Social media engagement plays a vital part in the marketing activities of Higher Educational Institutes (HEIs). The extant studies clearly demonstrate that having a social media presence and posting content alone without a strategy in place would not lead to higher awareness, branding, or enrolments of HEIs. Accordingly, this study, attempts to build predictive models for social media engagement for HEIs in an emerging market context. The official Facebook insights data of a HEI have been utilized for this model-building purpose. Pre-processing and feature engineering steps are performed initially, followed by cluster-based-class-labelling. The labelled classes are further trained with several machine learning models, and the best-performing ones are selected based on K-fold cross-validation. Hyperparameter optimization has been further performed on the best-chosen classifiers. This study is a pioneering attempt to build a predictive model for social media engagements of HEIs in an emerging market context. The proposed predictive models would be a handy tool for devising social media content posting strategies.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Social media engagement | Predictive modelling | Higher educational institutes | Social media analytics
Subjects: Physical, Life and Health Sciences > Computer Science
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Education Research
Social Sciences and humanities > Social Sciences > Behavioral Studies
Depositing User: Mr. Syed Anas
Date Deposited: 12 Jun 2026 04:20
Last Modified: 12 Jun 2026 04:20
Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdec.2026.04.002
URI: https://pure.jgu.edu.in/id/eprint/11623

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