Awareness and use of social media network for information dissemination among undergraduates in Benue State University, Makurdi, Nigeria

This study investigated the awareness and use of social media network for information dissemination among undergraduates in Benue State University, Makurdi, Nigeria. The study adopted a survey research design. The population of the study comprised of all undergraduates from Library and Information Science Department Benue State University. The sample was 152 Undergraduate selected through a simple sampling technique. A selfconstructed questionnaire was designed and distributed to collect data from the respondents and the instrument was validated by experts in Library and Information Science Department. Internal consistency coefficient was tested using the Cronbach Alpha method and 0.78 was established as the coefficient, indicating that the instrument is reliable and good for the study. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics of frequency, percentages and mean. Findings of the study revealed that, the social media networks used by the students are; Facebook, WhatsApp , Instagram, Snapchat, X, LinkdIn, Flicker, MySpace, e-mail, Google+, YouTube, blogs, BBM and Friendster. Following the findings of the study, recommendations were made such as: students should also be encouraged to use other Social media networks e.g. Skype, Badoo etc. in the dissemination of information resources, network providers can develop such packages, such as cheap tariff plans, cheap data plans, decent coverage of the network and other user-required data incentive packages amongst others.