PERCEPTION OF STUDENTS TOWARDS SOCIAL MEDIA AS MARKETING TOOLS

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to investigate the perception of UNILAG students towards social media as marketing tools: An appraisal of Facebook. It was established that companies are promoting their products and services on social media especially facebook while many students patronise the products/services. Respondents admitted that very often they clicked like, share, comment and view advert on social media to the extent of navigating the sponsors webpage. The challenges facing social media users in patronizing goods and services online were attributed to fear of been duped, poor browsing data and service to stay long on a social media and blogs. Survey research design was adopted using questionnaire for data gathering. Two hundred (200) respondents were drawn among the students using non-probability sampling method (purposive sampling technique) to pick the respondents. However, out of 200 copies of the administered questionnaires one hundred and eighty nine (189) copies were retried upon which the analysis was based. Frequency and percentage with tables was used in data analysed. It was recommended that companies and individuals should watch over some sites that may be using their name or related to dupe people online. All effort should be developed to ensure that fraud is minimized to the barest minimum, so that people especially, the internet users can have a rest of mind to shop online and receive their products and services.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1    Background of the Study

This chapter introduces the subject of the study which is the social media and also outlines the motivation of the study including aims and objective of the study. This is also followed by definition of research problems and limitation of the research.

Social media is a phenomenon that has drawn a lot of attention both to companies and individuals interacting on the networking landscape. However, when it comes to giving a clear definition of what social media really is, the understanding of the term is very minimal. Managers and academic researchers seem to differ on how social media differ from interchangeable related concept web 2.0 and User Generated Content (Kaplan and Haenlein: 2009).

Looking way back into the history of the internet where social media might have evolved from, a clear understanding of related concepts can be derived. In 1979, Truscott and Ellis from Duke University created the Usenet, a worldwide discussion system that allowed users to post public messages. Usenet is a