Exploring the link between social media and graduate entrepreneurship : A study on social media’s influence on last-year undergraduate students’ self-efficacy with regards to their entrepreneurial intentions

Abstract: This paper’s objective is to examine the social media influence on students’ self-efficacy with regards to their entrepreneurial intentions. This thesis explores a topic which has received little to no attention at all, and the investigation sheds light on social media in an aspect different from marketing. The paper examines the social media influence on self-efficacy among future graduates with regards to their entrepreneurial intentions, as they are facing their immediate career choice. Moreover, the study fills several literature gaps in the field of graduate entrepreneurship, pointed out by previous studies and serves as a foundation for future research on the topic how social media can influence self-efficacy. The research was handled in a quantitative manner, following previous studies on entrepreneurial intentions and applying existing questionnaire scales regarding self-efficacy and entrepreneurial intentions in combination with self-administered social media scale. The target population consisted of last year Bulgarian undergraduate students with a smaller reference group of international students, currently in their last year of business studies at Sweden for the sake of comparison. The findings displayed that there are clear cause-and-effect relationships between social media usage frequency and self-efficacy of the students, as well as between their feeling of connectedness associated with their social networks and their level of self-efficacy. The results also indicate that social media activity frequency is negatively correlated with the level of self-efficacy among Bulgarian, whereas this relationship is statistically insignificant for the  reference group. A main limitation of this study is the fact that the psychological impact of social media usage amongst students on their perceived level of self-efficacy can hardly be investigated within the borders of a Bachelor’s thesis, since there are many factors that affect the individual’s self concept and they also vary among different individuals. Moreover, the desired number of observations was not reached, which could have implications on the results’ representativity.