Youngsters Perception Toward Social Networking Advertising: Does Social Media Advertising Factors Still Matter?

Abstract

Social Networking Sites (SNS) including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, Flickr and My Space are significantly grown in popularity among youngster and has become powerful media for advertisers as well as advertising industry all around the world. Advertising via social networking platform allows segmentation of advertising activities based on customers’ demographic. Hence, it is different from social medial advertising which is public-focused based. Thus, this study aims to explore does the important success factors for social media advertising still matter toward youngsters’ perception on social networking advertising. As such, the study assess the relationships between five main social media advertising success factors (informativeness, entertainment, credibility, irritation and customization) with  youngsters’ perception toward social networking advertising. The study is quantitative based. Data was collected from 274 undergraduate students from the Faculty of Management (FM), Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) via convenience sampling technique. Data analysis was done via descriptive analysis and Person correlation test. The findings from the study suggested that all the five social media advertising factors are significantly correlated with youngsters’ attitude towards social network advertising. In addition, finding from this study also revealed that credibility or the trustworthiness of social network advertising is viewed by youngsters as the least important factor. Perhaps this is because of youngsters generally view information in social network is lack of reliability and credibility as compare with traditional face to face networking platform.