Social Media, Advertising Messages and the Youth: Any Influence?

Abstract

Social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube, twitter, and many others are popular  internet sites where people especially youth interact freely, sharing and discussing information about each other and their lives, products or services, using multimedia mix of personal words, pictures, videos and audio. Advertisers have always been fascinated by media and the youth because of their primacy to business. Social media are the latest platform that advertisers are spending huge part of their advertising budget on, yet there is little or no research on the influence these media have on the youth. The population of study is students of university of Lagos and Caleb University. The survey design was adopted with the use of questionnaire as data collection instrument. A sample of 300 respondents was randomly selected and test instrument administered on them. The findings showed that 93.5% of the respondents said they were exposed to advertisements on social media. 47% said social media advertisements had positive influence on them, 45.2% said they ignore advertisements on social media, while only 20% purchase products advertised on social media. The researchers concluded that social media may contribute to brand awareness, create interest in the prospect and may in conjunctions with other factors move prospect to take desired decision. However, social media should not be seen as the ultimate media to reach the elusive youth market.

Keywords: Social media, Advertising Messages, Youth, Influence