Abstract
Background: There is growing evidence that social media addiction is an enduring problem among students. This information can be used by marketers to create specific advertisement campaigns for students to promote organisational branding.Objectives: The aim of this study was to determine the mediating role of psychological dependence between social networking sites (SNSs) addiction and attitude towards social networking advertising among a sample of rural students in South Africa.Method: This research adopted a positivist paradigm with a quantitative approach and a descriptive research design. Data were collected using questionnaires, which were distributed to 289 respondents residing within a rural community in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa.Results: This study found a relationship between: (1) perceived ease of use and habit, (2) perceived ease of use and psychological dependence, and (3) psychological dependence and attitude towards SNSs advertisement.Conclusion: Social media advertising should offer precise location-based targeting and data-driven users’ profiling, segmenting the target market according to preferences, likes and hobbies, through data mining and analytical interpretation of results as these are attributes that are not offered by traditional media.
Highlights
There are 31 million people in South Africa who are currently using the Internet, of which 79% are estimated to be university students (Lin & Wang 2017)
These results were similar to those reported by Hamid et al (2016) that perceived ease of use of social networking sites (SNSs) leads to behaviour that is automatic and becomes a habit (Yang et al 2016)
The current study investigated the relationship between perceived ease of use and psychological dependence
Summary
There are 31 million people in South Africa who are currently using the Internet, of which 79% are estimated to be university students (Lin & Wang 2017). The ubiquitous nature of social media means that it is trendy among students, as they can access the Internet on various devices whenever and wherever they want (Marino et al 2018). Checking and posting on social networking sites (SNSs) has become a habit for young adults, such as students, because of consistent access, use and continuous interaction. The students make use of social media to access information for academic purposes and communicate with lecturers via email (Lau & Lee 2018). There is growing evidence that social media addiction is an enduring problem among students. This information can be used by marketers to create specific advertisement campaigns for students to promote organisational branding
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