Attention to Facebook advertising and its impact on students

Abstract

Social networking sites have opened the doors of communication allowing people from around the world to engage and to interact with each other. As one of the most outstanding social networking communities, Facebook boasts over 1 billion active users, visiting the platform several times a day. The purpose of this study is to examine whether Lebanese students pay attention to the ads displayed on Facebook and what kind of attitudes they have toward Facebook ads. A thorough revision of relevant literature in the fields of online advertising, Facebook advertising attention, media elements, and online advertising impact was conducted to establish the hypotheses and the theoretical foundations of this study. Three hypotheses were tested on a sample of 426 Lebanese university students surveyed from Balamand and Notre Dame University-Louaize and the results were analyzed quantitatively. Results showed that 34% of students who were enrolled in a Facebook or group member never showed interest in ads, 41.8% rarely paid attention to Facebook Ads and 3.1% did pay attention. Moreover, 57% did not even click on a Facebook ad in comparison with 4% who said they did. Only 2.1% of the students tend to buy products based on ads provided while 52% either block or ignore the ad. The findings supported hypotheses one and three. Hypothesis one stated that the more time students spend on using Facebook, the more interest ads will be generated by users while hypothesis three said that positive effect and increase on ad liking are generated from media elements. The second hypothesis which states that being informed of Facebook advertising has a significant positive influence on students’ attitude towards Facebook ads was not supported.