The value co-creation concept has become a marketing answer to today's challenges, the economy is facing. The field of higher education (HE) is experiencing the same pressure of outer factors as any other service industry. As a result, service providers (colleges and universities), as well as customers (students, graduates and employers) are dissatisfied with the quality of services and the level of generated value. The aim of this paper is to discuss how universities can use value co-creation concept to improve the situation. We consider social media to become engagement platforms for enabling value cocreation. Therefore, this paper discusses their current usage and perspectives for Ukrainian HE in creating mutual value. Top-five Ukrainian universities in the Webometrics rating are analyzed in terms of their SM activities on Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. The value itself is considered a multi-dimensional category and the co-creation directions are analyzed in terms of the theory of consumption values (TCV) and from the perspective of two customer groups-students and employers. Recommendations include practical tools on engaging students and employers to the VCC process, grouped by the type of the value obtained.

The current research aims at analyzing the social media activity of the universities in EaP countries. During the COVID-19 pandemic, universities had to transfer their education processes and enrollment campaigns online. University management had to introduce new tools for communication and interaction to ensure the efficacy of cooperation between the university community, students, teaching staff, and other stakeholders. In this research, the authors analyze which factors affected the dynamics and directions of customer engagement with Universities' social media and how. The authors propose a framework to reveal the role of countries’ digital environment, educational environment, and university’s SM activity in increasing ER of university stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic on Facebook and Instagram. The authors outline managerial proposals for universities, including analytics-based SM content creation and planning, communicating socially essential issues.

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the ways of using a customer centric approach to develop a marketing strategy for universities. Customer centricity is defined as the university marketing strategy that implies unique intra-disciplinary and interdisciplinary studies, bringing into line individual students' experiences and capabilities with changing the market place and job opportunities. The main forces that urge higher education institutions to change the core of their marketing strategy are characterized; namely, MOOC development and eliminated geographical barriers that stimulate students' mobility. Further, four important directions of customer centricity are described, depending on the role the students and other university target audiences play in the process: the customers being the source of sustainable competitive advantage; customers as the source of information for the company; customers as the source of information for other representatives of the target audience; customers as employees and value co-creators. Universities need to revise their marketing mix, implementing consumer-oriented elements and reducing students' risks and expenses. Students should also be an essential part of the university's integrated marketing communications as the source of relevant information for target audiences. In addition, the role of students in value co-creation needs significant expansion. Customer-centricity in this case will no longer be limited to the use of individual elements without significant positive effects, but it will ensure obtaining a long-term competitive advantage in the education market. In a world of lifelong learners it will not only assist in completing singular transactions with first-year students but also ensure repeated "purchases" among alumni.

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The article substantiates the need for educational institutions to use Data Mining technology as a key to successful management decisions in modern realities. The study focuses on working with social media data. The authors emphasized the lack of attention to this issue among both foreign and Ukrainian scientists. The article outlines the algorithm for collecting and transmitting primary data obtained as a result of monitoring the activity of educational institutions in social networks to form models of various types of their actions. The model presented by the authors includes four stages. Stages one and two provide the list of factors / metrics that can be included in the model. These factors require an appropriate and high-quality data collection process. At the next stage, the authors propose data clustering as the most important process for the future use of social network data. It is emphasized that the formation of clusters will depend on the tasks facing the management teams of the educational market. The authors give several examples of such clustering but point out that the list is not exhaustive and can be significantly expanded. An important aspect of the availability of such databases is access to information not only for teachers, but also for all interested university staff. At the same time, each user (students, teachers, staff, administration) will receive data relevant to their requests and needs. The developed methodology will help increase the efficiency of management decision-making and implementation and provide an opportunity to justify the parameters of successful innovation in educational institutions in many respects, including the development of educational programs, implementation of new certification programs and disciplines, other services, etc.