Turkish Journal of Computer and Mathematics Education Vol.12 No.3 (2021), 2733-2745 ResearchArticle 2733 Success Factors of Social Media Applications (SMA): Case Study among UUM Students Mazlan Mohd Sappri 1 , Ahmad Aliy Soffian Mohd Yusoff 2 ,Mohd Faizal Omar 3 , Mohd Shukri Abd hamid 4 ,Nor Intan Saniah Sulaiman 5 1,2,3,4,5 Department of Decision Science, School of Quantitative Sciences, Universiti Utara Malaysia, 06010 Sintok, Kedah, Malaysia lolan@uum.edu.my* 1 , aliyyusoff@gmail.com 2 , faizal_omar@uum.edu.my 3 , mohdshukri@uum.edu.my 4 , Article History: Received: 10 November 2020; Revised: 12 January 2021; Accepted: 27 January 2021; Published online: 05 April 2021 Abstract: Social media application (SMA) shows several important functions that causing theincrement of usage among mobile application or mobile app users, especially among18 to 28 years-old users. This causing several developers to create their own SMA thathave been targeted to mobile app users. However, only several SMA managed tobecome popular and successful in term of usage, leaving other unpopular SMA in thelower rank of the Google PlayStore. SMA created by developer in Malaysia face thesame situation as mentioned before where those SMA were supposed to attractMalaysian mobile users more. To assess this situation, this study aims to identify thesuccess factors of SMA usage and develop a set of metric based on the success factorsusing research model that have been developed in the past. Information SystemSuccess Model (ISSM) were studied and chosen as the reference model for this studybecause the model is suitable and have been used by other researchers in studiesregarding social media and SMA. ISSM contains several success factors like systemquality, service quality and information quality that affect the user satisfaction and useof a system, where this model were modified in this study with the addition ofnetworking quality and perceive privacy factors. This study were conducted on 380Universiti Utara Malaysia (UUM) students and after analysing the data collected, allproposed success factors except of service quality were found to have a positive impacttowards user satisfaction and usage. The success factors were included in the metricdesign and the metric were presented in an evaluation form for SMA developer inMalaysia to evaluate and applied the metric in their SMA. Keywords:System Quality, Information Quality, User Satisfaction, Perceived Privacy, Metrics 1. Introduction Social media is a term that is often used to refer to a form of media related to interactive relationships between its users (Manning, 2014). Often media development is dividedinto two epochs, broadcast times and interactive times. All social media is included inthe digital platform, but not all digital objects are social media. Social media can beidentified with a trait of social media involving the participation and the relationshipbetween its users. Often, internet usage is focused on one-way links. When users visita website such as a news site, entertainment site, or shopping site, they simply visitand get information on the site only and no communication occurs. However, socialmedia is different. It is related to the two-way relationship between the users and thecommunication between them. Social media allows users to do several thingsincluding shared photo and video collections of themselves or withfriends and familyand see collections shared by others as well, communicate quickly with anyone onlinethrough various mediums such as text chat, voice chat or video chat, as well as playgames with friends and other online users. Otherthan SNS, types of social media platform available are virtual game and social world,content communities, collaborative project and blogs (Taiminen, 2016). According to Clement (2019), it is estimated that the number of social media usersworldwide is 2.65 billion in 2018 and it is expected that this number will continue toincrease to 3.1 billion by 2021. On the contrary, according to Ospina (2019) andMohsin (2019), the number of social media users in 2019 are 3.5 billion, with socialmedia users already accounting for 45% of the world's population. Apparently, thenumber of social media users in 2019 already exceed the estimated number of socialmedia users by 2021. According to Ospina(2019), the largest platform of social media around the world are Facebook, where theamount of users has reached 2.4 billion and positioning Facebook as the world‘snumber one social media, followed by YouTube and Instagram with more than onebillion users. Since the popularity of social media have been increases over year and with the development of mobile computing and software, mobile application for social media or social media applications (SMA) was developed to ease the usage of social media between the users. With the implementation of social media application, its popularity is increasing. In 2011, a survey was conducted to find 53% of smartphone users in North America used SMA (Mobile Phone Usage Report, 2011).