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1. Introduction
Undergraduate students (aged 18 to 21years) are at a pivotal moment in their lives. They are often moving away from the first time and may find college life difficult, experiencing both social and academic challenges (Parlette and Howard, 2010). Undergraduate students are expected to read further after class instructions to gather information for class work, assignments, seminars, term papers, project reports and this could be retrieved from the resources in the library (Quadri and Abomoge, 2013). “In colleges and universities, students have access to wide range of resources through libraries as well as other information services available on Web” (Kim and Sin, 2007). There has been proliferation of information sources and channels with the advances in information technology; social media is one of the information channels used by library and information centres for information acquisition, processing, storage and dissemination. Using social media for information seeking and sharing is a common practice (Morris et al., 2010; Tamine et al., 2016). Social media plays a significant role in conveying different types of information (i.e. education, entertainment, world affairs and casual information) (Osatuyi, 2013). Information is shared in social media in real time. Hence, it consists of the most recent and up-to-date information. The reasons for using social media as source of information and information-seeking tools are diverse and include social interaction, expression of opinion, information seeking, passing the time and reviews and recommendations (Hamid et al., 2016; Kim et al., 2014). The JISC (formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee) defines social media or Web 2.0 technologies as “Innovative online tools designed to enhance communication and collaboration”. Swaminathan et al. (2013) divided social media into blogs, networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and community websites (Wikipedia and YouTube). However, with the advancement in information technology, the trend of seeking information has changed, especially in the academic context (Cerretani et al., 2016; Hamid et al., 2016).
Marchionini (1995) was concerned with the proliferation of electronic/digital resources and observed that we deal with information in new forms, especially, electronic digital forms that are more abstract, more dynamic and more malleable than printed or painted information. With regard to information-seeking behaviour on social media, Chen et al. (2014) argued that active information-seeking behaviour...