SOCIAL MEDIA ACCEPTANCE: A RESEARCH AMONGST UNIVERSITY STUDENTS IN PALEMBANG

Today, one growing phenomenon on the Internet is undeniably social media. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Path, Pinterest and Google+ have grown so popular among Internet users especially in the sense of being universally and widely used. Indonesia is among the countries with the largest active social media users in the world (Socialbakers 2013). Thus the purpose of this study is identify the factors that most influence to the acceptance and use of social media among university students using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) by Davis (1989) as a theoretical background. External variables such as interpersonal and social networks and relevance were added to the orginal model. This study used the survey design with the total of 298 undergraduate students in Palembang, Indonesia, age between 17 to 25 as the samples. The results found that social media adoption is influenced by some factors, particularly perceived ease of use, interpersonal and social networks and relevance which have a positive significant effect on the adoption.