Evaluating Factors Affecting Social Media Adoption as a Knowledge Sharing Instrument Amid #FeesMustFall campaign

In the innovation-driven age, the use of social media technology has grown immensely, primarily for the purpose of social engagement between friends and acquaintances. Social media is amongst other key tools for knowledge sharing used by large companies to engage with their clients through public relations and marketing department. The researchers hypothesize that social media could have the same effect in the educational system as it does in the corporate level for the purpose of knowledge sharing amongst students. This study investigates factors that influence the adoption of social media technology by students from the two Durban-based Universities of Technology (UoT) in South Africa. This quest has been necessitated by the #FeesMustFall campaign which began in 2015 and 2016 by students from universities across the country. The university environment was at the peak of vulnerability in terms of security and safety and students could not attend lectures. Social media are hereby considered a safe platform to enable the teaching and learning process. Therefore, a questionnaire was administered to Marketing students in the two Durban-based UoT. A correlational analysis revealed that factors such as performance expectancy, educational background, economic status, social influence facilitating condition have multi-collinearity effect on the dependent variable, Facebook adoption. Therefore a combination of these factors should be manipulated and managed collectively by an instructional designer to enable knowledge sharing amongst students.