3. Growth of international student mobility
Growth of the Chinese market
Increasing competition
Chinese social media landscape
Platform Number of active users (millions)
Tecent QQ
843
QZone
755
WeChat
600
Baidu Tieba(forum)
300
Sina Weibo
250
3
4. Nature of International HE
High risk
Intangible
Study Destination Evaluation
High quality
information
Effective
communication
4
7. To investigate how social media source
characteristics - expertise, trustworthiness,
attractiveness and homophily influence the
usefulness of information used to evaluate
study destinations.
7
8. Technique: small group interview (4-6 participants)
Snow ball sampling
Dual degree
On shore Chinese students
Length of stay
Heterogeneity
Sample
Brisbane Sydney Melbourne Total
Groups 10 7 5 22
Participants 52 38 20 110
8
9. Two pilot interviews conducted in Brisbane
Semi-structured interviews
Nine open-ended questions
Stimulus
photo elicitation technique
Analysis
Leximancer
Manual content analysis
9
10. Concept Frequency Degree of importance
Student 110 100%
Manager 82 75%
Agent 76 69%
Appearance (Looks) 44 40%
Experience 28 25%
Similar 26 24%
Trustworthy 20 18%
Education 18 16%
Age 16 15%
Details 12 11%
10
11. Trustworthiness is more influential than expertise
“I feel like agents are not as trustworthy as students
as they try to get money from you. They tend to
promote the ones (here means institutions) that offer
the most commission. So most information posted by
agents would be an advertisement, or at least
commercial-oriented” (BF2).
“The students are trustworthy because they are
experiencing overseas life now; they will tell realistic
information about their personal experiences” (MF14).
11
12. Credibility is important
“students post their personal experience
online to share with others, with no intended
purposes” (MF4).
“there is no motive for students to share false
information; it was all about sharing their real
overseas life” (SF11).
12
13. Appearance matters
“I rank the male students first; he looks very
kind” (BM25).
“I rank them based on their appearance…the
female student looks nice and friendly; she
looks like a considerate and thoughtful
person…The last is the manager… just because
he looks like a profiteer” (MF9).
13
14. Similarity makes a difference
“I trust the female students more because
females have similar problems and it’s easier
for us to communicate” (SF9).
“I rank the male student first; he wears
sporting clothes which might indicate that he
loves sports. This is very similar to me. I feel
people who love sports would be quite open
and straightforward, easy to communicate
with, and also, we have a similar age”
(MM10).
14
15. One of the first attempts to identify the
social media communication cues that
influence student’s perceptions of study
destinations.
Findings suggest organisations to pay
attention to online source cues that trigger
higher perceived information usefulness and
develop effective social media marketing
strategies
15
16. Used choice-modeling techniques to further
investigate the relative importance of social
media communication attributes, such as
message, and receiver characteristics
Identified and profiled Chinese student
segments based on preferences of social
media attributes
16
The growth of Australian international HE has been spectacular. Australia was ranked as the world’s third largest provider, hosting 7% of all tertiary students .
Nationally, the number of international student enrolments has doubled since 2002. While there are declines in Vocational Education and ELICOS, HE seems to remain relatively robust.
In recent years, China has been the largest nation contributor to the international student population in Australia . In 2010-11, one fifth (20%) of all student visa applications were for China. Economically, China is now Australia’s largest source market worth $5.4 billion.
The burgeoning international student market has resulted in the emergence of new competitors. It has become increasingly important for education destinations to maintain their competitive advantage.
Chinese outbound students are chosen as the focus and context for this study. Restrictions in using western social media platforms have resulted in thriving home-grown Chinese equivalents. For example …. The number of users in these home-grown sites have increased dramatically, with Sina Weibo, wechat, Tecent QQ, Youku and Renren all exceeding 200 million active users in 2015.
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2.57
In order to address this objective, literature on international HE decision-making was looked at. The nature of international HE – expensive, high risk and intangible makes it a complex decision that requires high levels of scrutiny of choices. Due to the intangibility of international education, high quality information and effective communication become crucial when international students are evaluating potential study destinations.
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36
Communication in CMEs has become much more powerful with the development of Web 2.0 technologies. It represents the second phase in the Web’s evolution. It leverages the Web in a more interactive manner.
As a result, interpersonal influence brought by eWOM has been important information source when consumers make purchasing decisions. However, no substantial literature has been found in the area of international HE marketing.
Social media is one of the most popular types of Web 2.0 services. In this new era of social communication, consumers no longer passively receive one-way information from senders, but become proactive in co-creating the online content.
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46
Here, four source characteristics are identified from previous literature. First, the source perceived to possess good knowledge and awareness about the discussed objective – expertise, then motivated to provide accurate information – trustworthiness, third, the attractiveness of the source. In addition, homophily refers to the extent to which individuals share similarities in attributes like age, gender and lifestyle.
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2.11
Focus on group dynamics and enable the researcher to obtain insights and various ideas
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55