By Hezron Ochiel
Not long ago, I visited one of our satellite campuses with senior managers.
I wanted to establish whether our communication efforts were reaching students as effectively as we assumed.
So, I asked a group of students a simple question:
“How many of you follow our official social media pages?”
Our college invests considerable time and resources in X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and LinkedIn. With many of our students aged between 18 and 25, I expected almost every hand to go up.
Only a few did.
That moment was uncomfortable.
I asked another question: “If you don’t follow our official pages, where do you get updates from the college?”
Some mentioned classmates and WhatsApp groups. Others relied on the student portal or waited for notices to be forwarded.
Their answers challenged an assumption I had carried into that visit.
We were investing in platforms that students did not necessarily use as their first source of institutional information.
The experience made me reconsider how we plan communication.
How much time and money do institutions spend maintaining social media platforms without establishing where their audiences actually look for information?
The issue extends beyond higher education.
When a new digital platform becomes popular, communication teams often face pressure to establish a presence. Accounts are opened, content calendars developed and staff assigned to manage them.
Months later, an organisation may have more active channels without knowing whether those investments have helped its audiences.
Having worked in strategic communication for more than 15 years and conducted institutional communication audits, I believe we need to reconsider where our planning begins.
Where does our audience naturally begin its search for information?
The answer should influence which channels we prioritise, the content we produce and how we measure communication performance.
Why communication strategy should begin with audience behaviour
Most communication strategies describe the platforms an organisation intends to use.
There may be separate plans for Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, email and the institutional website. Each comes with targets for reach, engagement and content production.
Yet the information needs of the intended audience can receive surprisingly little attention.
Consider a student looking for an examination timetable.
The student needs the correct timetable, confirmation that it is official and instructions about any action required.
The information might first arrive through a class WhatsApp group. The student could then visit the institutional portal to verify it before sharing it with classmates.
From the institution’s perspective, the portal is the official communication channel. From the student’s perspective, WhatsApp was where the information journey began.
Both channels contributed, but served different purposes.
This behaviour is consistent with established information-seeking research.
In his 1999 paper, Models in Information Behaviour Research, T. D. Wilson examined how people’s information needs arise within particular circumstances and how those circumstances influence information-seeking behaviour.
Brenda Dervin’s Sense-Making approach similarly explores how people encounter gaps in their understanding and seek information that helps them make sense of their situation.
These approaches offer a useful foundation for examining communication from the audience’s perspective.
Building on that thinking, my institutional communication experience and audit findings, I developed three practical planning tools: the Audience Presence Principle, the Audience Information Journey and the Social Platform Investment Matrix.
They address related decisions: where an organisation should establish a presence, how its audiences use information and how communication resources should be allocated.
The Audience Presence Principle™
The Audience Presence Principle proposes that organisations should prioritise communication channels according to how their audiences obtain information and use it to make decisions.
The principle begins with evidence of audience behaviour.
An institution may attract considerable engagement on TikTok, yet prospective students may prefer its official website when seeking admission requirements.
The platforms serve different purposes. Their value depends on what the audience needs at a particular moment.
This distinction matters when allocating communication budgets.
Few organisations have sufficient staff or resources to maintain every digital platform equally well. Each additional account requires content, monitoring and ongoing management.
The Audience Presence Principle encourages communication teams to examine where people expect to find particular information and whether the organisation is meeting that expectation.
An audit might reveal that social media is useful for announcing opportunities, while a dedicated portal is more effective for helping students complete applications.
With that evidence, managers can make more informed decisions about where to invest.
Figure 1: The Audience Presence Principle™
Framework developed by Hezron Ochiel. It proposes aligning organisational communication presence with the channels audiences use to obtain and assess information. Source: Hezron Insights.
The Audience Information Journey™
The Audience Presence Principle helps organisations determine where they need to be visible. The Audience Information Journey examines what people do with the information they encounter.
I developed the Audience Information Journey™ to help communication professionals assess five activities that can influence audience behaviour.
These are Discovery, Verification, Discussion, Action and Advocacy.
They are not necessarily sequential.
Someone may discuss an announcement before checking whether it is authentic. Another person may act immediately and seek clarification afterwards. Some return to an official source several times, while others never share the information.
The framework therefore provides a way to examine information behaviour, rather than prescribing a fixed path that every audience must follow.
1. Discovery: Where people encounter information
Discovery concerns how someone first becomes aware that information exists.
A student may learn about examination registration through a classmate, a forwarded notice or the institutional website.
Communication teams need to establish whether important information reaches the intended audience early enough to be useful.
2. Verification: How people establish credibility
People may want confirmation that information is accurate before relying on it.
They could check the official website, consult an authorised officer or compare a forwarded message with an institutional notice.
The communication challenge is to make authoritative information accessible and easy to recognise.
3. Discussion: How people interpret information
Audiences often discuss information with people they know.
Students may consult classmates to understand examination instructions or clarify a deadline.
These conversations can be helpful, although misunderstandings may spread when the original message is unclear.
Institutions should pay attention to recurring questions and provide explanations that address them.
4. Action: What people do with information
Communication should help people complete the task for which they sought information.
A student may need to register for an examination or submit an application.
At this stage, communication teams should examine whether the instructions are understandable and whether people encounter difficulties completing the process.
5. Advocacy: How informed audiences assist others
Some people share information, answer questions or recommend services after using them.
The classmates who forwarded official notices during my campus visit were contributing to institutional information distribution.
Their involvement was useful, but it also demonstrated the need to make accurate information available for confirmation.
Advocacy is one possible outcome of the information journey. It should not be assumed that everyone who receives information will become an advocate.
Figure 2: The Audience Information Journey™
Framework developed by Hezron Ochiel showing five interconnected information activities: Discovery, Verification, Discussion, Action and Advocacy. These may overlap, recur or occur in different orders. Source: Hezron Insights.
Evidence from the KMTC Communication Audit
My thinking about audience information behaviour was also informed by an internal communication audit I conducted at the Kenya Medical Training College.
The study examined awareness of communication channels, their use and their perceived contribution to meeting communication needs.
It achieved 92 responses from a target sample of 98, representing a response rate of 93.88 percent.
The findings revealed substantial differences in awareness.
| Communication channel | Awareness |
| Print communication | 73.56% |
| Social media | 68.97% |
| Electronic communication | 51.72% |
| Face-to-face communication | 48.28% |
Social media and print communication each recorded 48.28 percent for frequent use.
However, when respondents assessed how much different channels contributed to meeting their communication needs, the results told another story.
Social media recorded 36.78 percent for contribution to a very great extent, while face-to-face communication recorded 32.18 percent.
The distinction between awareness, frequency of use and perceived usefulness is important.
A widely recognised channel may be used frequently without being equally effective for every communication need.
The audit covered a specific institutional sample. Its findings should not be interpreted as representing all KMTC students or other institutions.
The conversation during my campus visit was a separate observation. It illustrated how students could receive official information through classmates and other indirect channels.
Both experiences strengthened my interest in examining how communication channels work together.
A channel’s effectiveness cannot always be understood from its individual performance statistics. It may contribute to a larger information process in which another channel provides clarification or enables action.
The Social Platform Investment Matrix™
Understanding audience behaviour is useful only if it informs decisions about communication resources.
Managing platforms requires staff time, content development and monitoring. Those resources have competing demands.
I developed the Social Platform Investment Matrix™ to help communication teams assess channels against four criteria.
| Criterion | What to assess |
| Audience presence | Does the intended audience use this channel for the relevant information need? |
| Audience trust | Does the audience consider information received through the channel credible? |
| Strategic value | Does the channel contribute to a defined communication objective? |
| Organisational capacity | Can the institution maintain the channel and respond effectively to its users? |
How to use the matrix
Begin with a specific audience and information need.
For example, an institution may want to improve how prospective students obtain admission requirements.
The communication team can examine the channels people currently use, drawing on stakeholder feedback, enquiry records and website analytics.
Each channel may then receive an illustrative score from 1 to 5 against the four criteria:
- 1: Weak performance or limited evidence of suitability.
- 3: Moderate performance.
- 5: Strong performance supported by evidence.
An unweighted total out of 20 provides an initial comparison.
However, the score should inform professional judgement rather than automatically determine investment.
A channel may attract relatively few users but remain essential for reaching people who cannot access mainstream digital platforms. Another may generate high engagement while contributing little to the institution’s priority services.
Communication teams should also record where evidence is missing. An unsupported score can create a false impression of precision.
The matrix is a proposed decision-support tool. Its scoring method has not been scientifically validated.
Its immediate value lies in making channel investment decisions more transparent and easier to discuss.
Figure 3: The Social Platform Investment Matrix™
Decision-support framework developed by Hezron Ochiel for assessing communication channels against audience presence, trust, strategic value and organisational capacity. Source: Hezron Insights.
Why communication audits matter when selecting platforms
Every year, industry reports identify emerging platforms, changing digital habits and technologies attracting public attention.
These reports provide useful background. They do not tell an organisation exactly how its own audiences seek information.
That requires local evidence.
An institution may discover through an audit that its website receives substantial traffic, yet users repeatedly contact staff because important instructions are difficult to locate.
The appropriate investment may involve improving the website’s navigation and information structure.
Opening another social media account would leave the underlying problem unresolved.
A communication audit can reveal these gaps by examining enquiry patterns, audience experiences and barriers to accessing information.
It should also consider which channels different audience groups can realistically use.
This is particularly important for institutions serving people with unequal access to devices, connectivity or digital services.
Why audience-centred communication matters in the age of AI search
Artificial intelligence is introducing another route through which people encounter information.
Alongside search engines, institutional websites and social media, audiences can now ask AI assistants questions and receive generated explanations.
Research published by the Nielsen Norman Group in 2025 examined how generative AI was influencing search behaviour.
Its findings indicated that users were adopting AI tools for certain information tasks while continuing to rely on conventional search in other circumstances.
This has implications for institutional communication.
Someone seeking admission information may encounter an AI-generated answer before visiting the college website.
That answer could be accurate. It could also contain outdated requirements, omit important conditions or rely on an unreliable source.
Communication teams should investigate how their organisations are represented in these systems, especially when inaccurate information could affect public decisions.
One practical approach is to test common audience questions across selected AI assistants and compare their responses with authoritative institutional sources.
The findings can reveal inaccuracies that deserve attention.
Making information clear, current and accessible on official platforms may improve its discoverability. It does not guarantee that AI systems will retrieve or represent it correctly.
AI search should therefore be considered within a wider communication audit, alongside the channels people already use.
Five practical steps for communication leaders
The three frameworks can be applied through five planning activities.
1. Conduct an audience information audit
Identify the questions audiences frequently ask and investigate where they seek answers.
Use interviews, surveys, enquiry records and relevant digital analytics to understand actual behaviour.
2. Map the Audience Information Journey
Examine how people encounter information, establish its credibility and use it.
Look for recurring sources of confusion, delays and difficulties that prevent them from completing tasks.
3. Evaluate existing communication channels
Apply the Social Platform Investment Matrix to compare channels against audience needs and organisational capacity.
Use the results to identify where resources are effective and where adjustments may be necessary.
4. Improve access to reliable information
Review frequently requested information and make important instructions easier to locate and understand.
Provide authoritative sources for verification and address common questions that emerge through stakeholder enquiries.
5. Measure outcomes and review decisions
Examine whether audiences obtain the information they need and successfully complete the intended action.
These findings should inform future communication investments.
Likes, impressions and follower growth remain useful indicators for certain purposes, but they cannot independently establish that a communication need has been met.
Final thought
I left that campus visit with a different understanding of our communication challenge.
We had invested in official digital platforms, yet some students were receiving institutional updates primarily through classmates, WhatsApp groups and forwarded notices.
The observation did not make our social media platforms irrelevant. It showed that we needed to understand their place within the wider information habits of our students.
I have carried that lesson into my thinking about communication audits and platform investment.
The Audience Presence Principle, Audience Information Journey and Social Platform Investment Matrix are intended to help communication teams examine those decisions more systematically.
They also provide a basis for further testing and refinement in different institutional settings.
Before an organisation commits resources to another communication platform, I believe its managers should be able to answer one question: Where does our audience naturally begin its information search, and how can we make that journey easier?
The answer may reveal that the organisation needs a new channel. It may equally reveal that improving an existing service would be a better use of its resources.
About the Author
Hezron Ochiel is the Assistant Director of Corporate Communication at the Kenya Medical Training College and the founder of Hezron Insights.
He has more than 15 years of experience in strategic communication, institutional reputation, media engagement and digital communication. His work includes communication audits, stakeholder engagement and applied research into AI search visibility and digital authority.
His previous work has appeared in publications including Reuters, The New Humanitarian and The Standard.