Exploring the patterns of social media use among business students in Malaysia

Social media is an important communication tool, which has substantially changed the way people interact with each other.Its potential use in a learning environment in higher educational institutions has also been debated.If its potential advantage in an academic environment is to be materialized, we need to know the extent university students use the new tool for academic purposes, which is largely unexplored in Malaysia. In this study, we explored the patterns of social media use for academic purposes of 227 business students in one public university in Malaysia. Using descriptive analyses, we observed that majority of our sampled students had Facebook account, further confirming the use of Facebook as the most popular social media platform across the world.Our finding roughly showed that the general level of use was rather high. We showed that female students used more frequently social media than male students.It was encouraging to observe that business students in our sample tended to use social media quite frequently for academic purposes.In general, our findings suggest the potential value of integrating social media in learning activities, as an important learning tool to enhance students‟ learning experience. Implications of the study for practice and recommendations for future research are offered