The use of virtual influencers as social media communicators and brand spokespeople is growing, yet is virtually untouched in higher education institutions for recruitment and student engagement, especially in the new Asian markets. This is a theory-based research on "Tuệ San" student ambassador product generated by AI for a public university in Vietnam to introduce campus life to potential students through Facebook. The research applies Social Influence Theory and the latest research on virtual influencers, with the development of a coding structure for the persona's posting history, based on communicator attributes (warmth, relatedness, interactivity, competence, empathy, uniqueness, and credibility). The posts were double-coded for these attributes and linked to publicly available engagement metrics, as well as communicative function and explicit disclosure of artificial origin. The persona is very warm and peer-related; institutional credibility cues are hardly ever present and engagement is most visible in posts that contain both peer-relatedness and personal disclosure, but not in pure promotional posts. Interestingly, there was no evidence that audience engagement was affected by a clear indication of the artificial nature of the persona, so a synthetic institutional communicator might be accepted as a communicator by would-be students if the artificial nature of the persona was clearly indicated. The study presents a flexible analytical perspective on institutional virtual influencers and offers universities some concrete recommendations on how to communicate using AI for recruitment, as well as some questions about audience perception and acceptance, which are currently being explored through a survey-based investigation.

Authors:
Tuan Duc Dao, Vietnam National University, Vietnam
Hang Dinh Thi Thuy, Vietnam National University, Vietnam
Lan Huong Nguyen, Vietnam National University, Vietnam

About the Presenter(s)
Dao Tuan Duc is a Lecturer at the Hanoi School of Business and Management, VNU. His interests lie in organisational communication across industries; his current project examines communication and employee engagement.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/tuanducdao

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