Communication competence on Facebook

Social media has become part of many people’s way of life. One of them most popular social media sites is Facebook which allows them to establish and maintain connectivity worldwide. One aspect of Facebook users that has not yet been explored much as a subject of investigation is communication competence. This descriptive-comparative study was conducted to determine the perceived communication competence on Facebook of the select students of University of Science and Technology of Southern Philippines (USTP). Stratified random sampling was used to determine a sample size of 80 students. Validated survey questionnaires were distributed to the respondents. The data were analyzed using mean, percentage and standard deviation to describe the variables investigated in the study such as frequency and level of the students’ exposure on Facebook, and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to determine the significant difference of communication competence sub-skills among the students. The findings show that most of the respondents were highly competent communicators in certain sub-skills while the rest were relatively competent in other sub-skills. Overall, the respondents need to acquire—or rather, holistically develop—their communication competence which combines the sub-skills on “knowing what to say” and “knowing how to communicate”