Success Factors of Social Media Applications (SMA): Case Study among UUM Students

Abstract

Social media application (SMA) shows several important functions that causing theincrement of usage among mobile application or mobile app users, especially among18 to 28 years-old users. This causing several developers to create their own SMA thathave been targeted to mobile app users. However, only several SMA managed tobecome popular and successful in term of usage, leaving other unpopular SMA in thelower rank of the Google PlayStore. SMA created by developer in Malaysia face thesame situation as mentioned before where those SMA were supposed to attractMalaysian mobile users more. To assess this situation, this study aims to identify thesuccess factors of SMA usage and develop a set of metric based on the success factorsusing research model that have been developed in the past. Information SystemSuccess Model (ISSM) were studied and chosen as the reference model for this studybecause the model is suitable and have been used by other researchers in studiesregarding social media and SMA. ISSM contains several success factors like systemquality, service quality and information quality that affect the user satisfaction and useof a system, where this model were modified in this study with the addition ofnetworking quality and perceive privacy factors. This study were conducted on 380Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) students and after analysing the data collected, allproposed success factors except of service quality were found to have a positive impacttowards user satisfaction and usage. The success factors were included in the metricdesign and the metric were presented in an evaluation form for SMA developer inMalaysia to evaluate and applied the metric in their SMA.