Facebook usage, socialization and academic performance

•Examines the impact of Facebook usage on students' academic performance.•Analyse whether Socialization influences Facebook usage.•Collected data from 1165 Malaysian university students via a questionnaire survey.•Relationship between students' Academic Performance and Facebook usage.

This paper examines the impact of Facebook usage on students' academic performance. In addition, it also analyse whether Socialization influences Facebook usage. Empirical data was collected from 1165 Malaysian university students using a questionnaire survey. It was found that the construct Socially Accepted influences Facebook usage while Acculturation does not have any significant relationship with usage. The results also illustrated that there is a positive relationship between students' Academic Performance and Facebook usage i.e. the higher the usage the better they perceived they perform.