A rapid growth and an increasing popularity of social media such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter etc. have drawn more and more attention from marketers and researchers. Companies now are throwing big money at advertising on social media, hoping to attract consumers’ Unfortunately, there is a lack of quantitative studies on social media users’ perceptions of or attitudes towards advertising on social media. So, we take this challenge as an opportunity to conduct a study on investigating social media users’ attitudes towards social media advertising. In order to answer our research question, theories and literatures regarding advertising, Internet advertising, social media advertising and attitude are reviewed. Based on researcher review, a conceptual framework model is established. Within the model, three dimensions of factors that affect attitude towards social media advertising are taken into account on the key objectives. To fulfill our research objectives, 370 consumers are selected as a group of respondents for this study at young generation people in Sri Lanka. Both online and paper-based surveys are conducted with self-administered questionnaires. With the help of SPSS, we test our hypotheses with descriptive analysis, correlation analysis and linear regression analysis. The result of the survey indicates that the overall attitude towards social media advertising is positive. We also find out that attitude is influenced by the characteristics of social media advertising such as informativeness, entertainment and interactivity. In addition, there is a significant difference of attitudes in the different usage groups, but our result does not support that credibility, reference group, privacy concern, gender and age would affect attitude. With our findings, we expect this study could contribute to marketing communication research. However, the representativeness of our samples limits our ability to generalize to social media users, and a further study on cultural influence on attitude towards social media advertising might be needed.
