UDC 339.138

Danilina E.I.¹ (Moscow, Russian Federation) – danilina05@mail.ru

¹MIREA – Russian Technological University

Abstract. Over the past ten years, social media has become one of the main ways for Russian universities to attract applicants. However, there is still no consensus on how to measure the effectiveness of this work—researchers use different approaches, and their results are poorly comparable. The aim of this study is to systematize the methods used to study university activity on social media and their suitability for solving two practical problems: attracting applicants and providing information support for the educational process. To this end, publications from 2020-2025 from Russian and international scientific databases were analyzed. All identified methods are grouped into five categories: integrated platform statistics; applicant and student surveys; content analysis; tracking the user journey from initial contact to application; interviews and focus groups. The results show that the more a university publishes, the fewer interactions each post receives—this is confirmed by both international and Russian studies. Surveys developed for Western platforms don’t always work correctly on VKontakte and MAX. A direct link between social media activity and admissions rates hasn’t yet been convincingly proven. The most realistic approach for Russian universities is to combine VKontakte and MAX statistics with applicant surveys and data from the admissions office’s application tracking system.

Keywords: applicant recruitment, web analytics, content analysis, natural language processing (NLP), social network analysis (SNA), digital footprint, VKontakte.

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For citation: Danilina, E. I. (2026). A toolkit for studying social media in higher education marketing. CITISE, 3, 159-168. (In Russian).