Professional Documents
Culture Documents
1. Introduction
The new technologies of communications have been efficaciously adopted
and become a model. As reported by Pingdom (2012), number of Internet
users worldwide in the year 2012 reached 2.27 billion, almost twice it was 5
years ago (1.15 billion). It is human nature to get used to changes, so most of
us have a tendency to forget how rapidly the world has changed, and keeps
changing. Despite the popularity of social media, there is very limited
research literature regarding social media advertising itself and measuring
attitude towards social media advertising (SMA).
Most previous research studies are on investigating consumers attitudes
towards advertising on traditional media (O'Donohoe, 2001), or attitudes
towards advertising on new media such as the Internet or mobile phone
(Tsang, Ho, & Liang, 2004). In relevance to this study, there are some
literatures discussing different aspects of social media but with certain
limitations. For example Zeng, Huang and Dou (2009) have been studied on
how the group norms and social identity affect social networking sites users
perception on online advertising.
__________________________
*Arasu Raman is with Faculty of Business, Communications and Law, INTI International
University, Malaysia. E-mail: arasu.raman@newinti.edu.my
**Vijayan Ramasamy is with Faculty of Business, Communications and Law, INTI
International University, Malaysia. E-mail: vijayan.ramasamy@newinti.edu.my
2. Literature Review
2.1 Social Media Advertising
Currently, advertising appears on all these different types of social media
websites. All these advertising that is carried on social media could be
referred as social media advertising, and it could be categorized as part of
Internet advertising. It adopts many common features from Internet
advertising such as interactivity, freedom of choice, and two-way
communication. But social media advertising also has its uniqueness because
of distinctive characteristics of social media, which make it different from
Internet advertising (Kolek and Saunders, 2008), for example advertising on
social media has evolved from the characteristics of social media such as
user-generated content. The social media users could upload and publish the
video of their own advertisement of their favorite products or brands on the
content community sites such as YouTube. The advertising content itself is no
longer generated or control by the company itself as it used to be in traditional
media or on Internet.
2.2 Youth in Malaysia
There are various definitions for youth in different parts of the world. The term
"youth" is referred to individuals between the ages of 16-25 (Berkley and
Burton, 2009). The National Youth Policy (2012), categories Malaysian
individuals who are within the age group of 18 to 25 years as Youth. Where
else, The United Nations has defines youth as persons aged between 15 to
24 years. In Malaysia, during the year 2011, there were 10.1 million youth in
the country. The Department of Statistics Malaysia (2011) has stated that for
the 18 to 25 years age group, there were equal numbers of males and
females, while in the age group of 26 to 40 years the proportion of males was
slightly higher than females at 50.3 per cent and 49.7 per cent respectively.
The majority of the youth (53.5 per cent) lived in urban areas. There were
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3. Methodology
A total of 250 questionnaires were distributed and 180 valid feedbacks were
obtained and the data analyzed with the help of SPSS. The respondents of
this study consist of only the youth of Malaysia who are of the age group of 18
to 25 years. A combination of both descriptive and explanatory research types
is used in this study. The descriptive research is used in order to explain the
variables used in this study such as user perceptions towards social media
advertising, entertainment and privacy and security concern, whereas the
explanatory research is used in this study in order to identify the relationship
between the variables used. Adopting quantitative research method is the
most appropriate way to answer each of the research questions and collect
data from the targeted population, i.e., Malaysian youth (18 to 25 years) from
popular shopping malls such as Mid Valley, Jaya Jusco and Pavillion thru
self-administered surveys. Convenience sampling is adopted as it is a
technique in which interviewers are asked to find respondents who happen to
be conveniently accessible (Zikmund and Babin, 2007). The research has
benefited from this by obtaining high response rate.
The first section of the questionnaire in this study is regarding the social
media usage of respondents, the second section is regarding the various
variables used in the study in order to know the respondents perception
toward social media advertising. All the questions in this section are used by
5-point Likert scale. Respondents are asked to rate their responses from 1
Strongly Disagree to 5 Strongly Agree with the statements about different
perspectives of the characteristics of social media and psychographic factors.
In order to avoid confusion, the statements have the same order of response
categories. (i.e. the option Strongly Agree is always on the far left side).
Classification
Frequency
Percentage (%)
Gender
Male
96
53.3
Female
84
46.7
18
46
25.6
19
56
31.1
20
23
12.8
21
25
13.9
22
3.3
23
2.8
24
11
6.1
25
4.4
Malay
72
40
Chinese
65
36.1
Indian
27
15
Others
16
8.9
Diploma
66
36.7
Degree
70
38.9
Masters
14
7.8
Others
30
16.7
Age
Race
Education
Classification
Frequency
Percentage (%)
65
36.1
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6.1
YouTube
35
19.4
18
10
Word Press
3.3
Blogspot
4.4
Xanga
2.2
Slide share
29
16.1
Others
2.2
Below 6 months
3.9
6 months - 1 year
15
8.3
2 - 3 years
40
22.2
Above 3 years
118
65.6
3.9
1 - 3 hours
35
19.4
4 - 6 hours
5.0
129
71.7
Table 4.1 demonstrates the social media websites in the respondents are a
member. It shows that 36.1% of the total sample use Facebook followed by
19.4% of the sample using YouTube. It means that a higher number of
respondents are engaged in the website Facebook when compared to the
other social media website. It can also be understood that 65.6% of the total
respondents have been a members of these social media websites for more
than 3 years. Also, majority of the respondents (71.7%) spend more than 6
hours on social media websites. This evidencing that the youth use social
media heavily now-a-days.
No. of Items
Cronbach's Alpha
0.885
Entertainment
0.789
Table 4.2 shows the summary of reliability test. The first construct is
Perception toward SMA which is the dependent variable of the study. The
cronbach alpha for this construct was initially 0.435 which is not acceptable.
The cronbach alpha for the first construct, Privacy and security scored a very
low value of 0.073. In conclusion, the constructs used in the study such as
Perception toward SMA, and Entertainment are all reliable except for privacy
and security which scored a low cronbach alpha and therefore cannot be
relied on.
Table 4.3 Summary of KMO and Bartletts test
Perception
toward SMA
Entertainment
Privacy
and
Security
0.745
0.500
0.500
Bartlett's Significance
0.000
0.000
0.000
From Table 4.3, it is understood that the KMO values for each and every
construct have fulfilled the minimum requirement adequacy. The construct
Perception toward SMA, which is the dependent variable of the study initially,
scored a low value of 0.435. Due to this reason, one item with low
communalities and low component matrix was discarded. Thus the KMO
score of Perception toward SMA increased to 0.745 which is > 0.5. The
constructs Entertainment and Privacy and Security had a low score at first,
which are 0.466 and 0.436 respectively. These values cannot be accepted
thus one item with the lowest value from each of the constructs was removed
and the overall KMO score of Entertainment and Privacy and Security went
up to 0.500 which is acceptable. The values of all the constructs mean that all
variables are correlated with one another. On the whole, it can be said that all
the constructs used in this study are meeting the requirements of adequacy.
The relationship between privacy and security concern and perception
toward SMA
Privacy and Security concern scored a low cronbach alpha and the items
under privacy and security concern are not correlated to each other. Also, it is
not significant in the overall regression. Thus, Privacy and Security concern
does not have an association with perception toward SMA. Hence,
Hypothesis 1 is rejected.
The hypothesis H1 examined whether there is any association between
privacy and security concern and user perception towards SMA. From
obtained results, it can be seen that there is no association between privacy
and user perception towards SMA. This finding contradicts with the findings of
Isp and Suhr (2009), in which they found out that there is a positive significant
8
.605
Adjusted R
R Square
Square
Estimate
Durbin-Watson
.366
.358
.71001
2.746
The Table 4.4 demonstrates that the R value is 0.605 which means 60.5% of
the variation in perception of SMA can be explained by Captures attention
and Enjoyable to watch. The Adjusted R Square is 36.6%. The DurbinWatson is 2.746.
Table 4.5 F test of Entertainment and perception toward SMA
Model
1
Sum of Squares
df
Mean Square
Sig.
Regression
51.417
25.709
50.998
.000
Residual
89.227
177
.504
Total
140.644
179
The p value from Table 4.5 shows that it is < 0.001 which means that at least
one of the two variables: Captures attention and Enjoyable to watch. Hence,
Entertainment is a significant predictor.
Entertainment is significant (sig=0.000) in the overall regression. As depicted
in the Table 4.6, the t value is 4.804 and coefficient of Entertainment is 0.556.
Therefore, entertainment has a positive relationship with user perception
toward SMA at 1% significance level. The perception toward SMA will
Standardized
Coefficients
Coefficients
Model
Std. Error
Beta
Sig.
Entertainment
0.556
0.116
0.390
4.804
.000
References
Adam Mahamat 2011, Students perception on social networking sites
influence on academic performance. [Online]
Available at
<http://www.academia.edu/1067973/the_influence_of_social_networking
_sites_on_studentsacademic_performance_in_malaysia > [Accessed on
February 16th 2013]
Berkley and Burton. 2009, Adolescent Services Strategic Plan [Online]
Available
at
<
http://www.state.nj.us/dcf/about/divisions/oas/OASSuppReport120611.p
df > [Accessed on February 27th 2013]
Boyd and Ellison 2006, Friends, Friendster and Top 8: Writing community
into being on social network sites, [Online] Available at
<http://journals.uic.edu/fm/article/view/1418/1336, > [Accessed on 30th
January 2013]
Cho, C. H., Lee, J. G., and Tharp, M. 2001, Different forced-exposure levels
to banner advertisements. Journal of advertising research, 41(4), 45-56.
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