Social Media and Public Relations Counselling of Higher School Top Management in Nigeria (Published)
Social media have improved the operations of public relations. The ability of social media to elicit immediate feedback has made social media veritable tools in the hands of public relations practitioners in counselling school management on corporate policies. This study explores the pattern of social media usage by public relations practitioners. It shows the level of impact made with the use of social media in public relations practice in influencing management on corporate policies. The study was guided by diffusion of innovation theory and system theory. Diffusion of innovation theory offers a solid and replicable framework for the process of moving an innovation through a social system over time. System theory deals with the interactivity that exist in an organisation as a social system. Using the descriptive design, questionnaire was administered on 170 purposively selected public relations practitioners in some selected institutions of higher learning across the country but only 120 responded. Findings show that public relations practitioners use social media in influencing top school management on corporate policies. This is evident as all the respondents affirmed that they use social media such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, among others to inform and influence top school management on corporate policies. The study concludes that social media are potent tools in influencing school’s policy formulation and implementation. The study recommends that institutions of higher learning should formulate and implement productive ICT policies and public relations practitioners should be trained regularly on the use of social media with a consequent expectation of migrating from the analogue to digital culture.
Keywords: Counselling, Digital Age, Public Relations, Social media, Web 2.0, top management