Does promoting student satisfaction factors, and experience via social media enhance their loyalty? The mediating role of positive eWOM and university’s image

Given that social media (SM) has become an integral part of the daily lives of university students and their main window to communicate with the world around them, higher education institutions can no longer help but adopt it as a major part of their marketing strategy and as a major communication channel to enhance their ability to retain their current students and attract new students. Therefore, this study aims to reveal the role of Social Media Marketing (SMM) in promoting student satisfaction factors at Al-Ahliyya Amman University (AAU) and improving their experience, which must have a significant successive impact, starting from enhancing the university's image, to expanding the spread of positive eWOM, and ultimately, increase students' loyalty to the university, To create a practical framework for building a marketing strategy that invests in SMM to enhance student loyalty, relevant literature was evaluated. Business school students were surveyed using a paper questionnaire distributed to students to increase interest and accuracy in answering, to extract conclusions from the data and model variables, a structural equation modelling using Smart-PLS was used. The survey results indicate that (AAU) has not invested sufficiently in promoting some of the satisfaction factors of its students and improving their experience. But in general, it affected somewhat positively the loyalty of its students. The research has important theoretical and practical implications.