The Impact of Social Networks on Students' Performance
The objective of this study is to determine the impact of using social media and its impact on students' performance and success. This research tries to identify the relationship between students' use of social networks and their success in their studies. It tries also to fi nd out whether time spent impacts students' performance and success. Whether students use social media more for entertainment or for teaching and information sharing purposes. The paper uses a quantitative approach for collecting the primary data. The data was collected by surveying 255 respondents from South East European University. The data analyses were done by SPSS so" ware program. Cronbach alpha is used for testing the validity and reliability of variables used in this study. The hypotheses were tested using One Simple T test. The obtained empirical results show that a great number of students are aware of advantages and disadvantages by the social media. Thus, due to a great percent of times spent on social networking activities, the performance and the success of students suff er setbacks which could lead to a poor performance and they might fail to create a balance between the social media and academic activities. Furthermore, it is about their addiction, the loss of time leading to consequences in their academic development, and they are also infl uenced to a great extent negatively by the social networking sites, because their a$ ention is focused on cha$ ing and music while their academic activities are neglected. Finally, based on the results of survey, we can conclude that impact of social media on the academic performance of students should focus more on the positive side than on the negative side to achieve balance. Hence, creating more pages for research and academic activities will enable students to improve their performance, thereby avoiding a distraction which leads to deviation from their academic work.