A university's brand equity is a key driver in communicating its values to prospective students. Meanwhile social media usage facilitated those prospective to gather information relevant to higher education institutions. A dynamic model focusing on customer-based brand equity often lack empirical support in higher education sectors, particularly in Malaysia. This study explores the role of social media usage as a factor to brand equity. It is believed that contribution of this social media uses, and gratification theory will help Private Higher Education Institutions (PHEIs) to better understand how the satisfaction of social media usage would increase its brand equity. Hence, this study aims to examine the relationship between social media usage and brand equity. This paper reviews literature related to social media usage towards brand equity in PHEIs with theoretically integrate the theory of uses and gratification. Drawing from the theory of uses and gratification the purpose of this study is to examine how social media usage influences brand equity. The quantitative findings from 180 undergraduates indicated social media usage influences the brand equity of higher education institutions. The results from structural equation modeling provided insight into how relationship developing, information sharing, self-presenting, entertaining of social media usage influences brand equity

This article review is intended to examine marketing strategies from several publications published concerning the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Halal tourism industry. A search in the database of Mendeley using a search string [“Halal tourism” AND “COVID-19”] conducted in June 2021 resulted in fourteen documents. These documents were then filtered in terms of the years of publication, the subject areas, type of document, category of access, and written in English. These papers were published in the areas related to Islamic Economics, Business, Marketing and Halal industry from 2020 to 2021 resulted in six relevant documents. Only relevant documents were selected for further analysis after the documents were reviewed for eligibility by looking at the abstracts and findings. The findings suggested marketing strategies as the key factors to be applied during the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure the sustainability and continuity of halal tourism. COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the tourism industry globally. This review article investigates the segmentation, target market, and positioning (STP) and 7P’s marketing strategies for the Halal tourism industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.