Potential international students use social media platforms to acquire important information about schools and their brand reputations while making international higher education decisions. By means of a cross-sectional data from 384 international students at three universities in North Cyprus, the study aims to explore the relationship between social media engagement, information credibility and enrolment intention. Furthermore, if information credibility works as a mediator between social media engagement and enrollment intention, and the moderating role of student type. The study makes several contributions to the literature review and its recommendation helps top management at universities and policy makers in North Cyprus to pay attention to the role of social media in recruiting international students. The findings of this study indicate that credibility fully mediates the relationship between social media engagement and enrollment intention, but student type doesn’t moderate the relationship between information credibility and enrollment intention. The limitations and future studies are discussed in this study.

This study provides an analytical view of the correlation between several factors that influence the credibility of information available through various sources on the Internet. The most critical factors include information quality, source credibility, argument strength, message credibility, and average credibility. Additionally, the study explores the impact of gender and years of experience as demographic variables on the nature and size of these relationships. The study relied on a critical review of previous related literature. In addition, it adopted an analytical approach using a sample of 300 Internet users through a questionnaire designed based on the study hypotheses. Most of these relationships were found to be at an average level, except for the relationship between source credibility and information credibility. No statistical indicators were observed. Consequently, the researchers acknowledge the need for caution when generalizing these results to society. The study also found that the gender of the recipient and the number of years of experience did not necessarily play a mediating role in the relationship between the tested factors and the credibility of information received via the Internet.