The impact of social media use on academic performance among university students

Social media use has been increasingly used and has become more popular among users, especially teen and youngsters. Based on the previous studies, there are mixed impacts of social media use on student’s academic performance. While some studies reported that social media brings negative impact on academic performance, others show otherwise. Owing to the inconsistencies of the existing findings, the current study is carried out to investigate the extent of social media use, the factors that influence social media use, and the effect of social media use on student’s academic performance. To achieve the research objectives, the questionnaire surveys are distributed to 107 MSU College students in Sungai Petani. The research model of the study is developed based on the Super-Peer Theory, Social Learning Theory (SLT), and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). The study specifically explores how addictions, social lifestyle, ease of use, usefulness, and social influence affect social media use and how social media use affects students’ academic performance. The findings discovered WhatsApp as the most popular platforms used by students, followed by Google+ and YouTube. As for the factors, social influence and usefulness are found to significantly influence social media use. Addiction/Internet dependency, ease of use, and social lifestyle are, however, not found to be significant. The results also show that social media use has a significant influence on a student’s academic performance.