Social media is broadly considered to create an effective collaborative learning experience among educators and students. Despite today’s growth of social media usage for learning, there is an astonishing lack of empirical research done in Malaysian educational institutions  on improving students' academic performance through the effective use of social media to create a desirable outcome. Thus, this research offers a review of literature that focuses on the factors for an effective collaborative learning and its prominent effect on students’ academic performance. By using an online survey questionnaire, the findings were analyzed using descriptive statistics in order to justify the research objective. Results from the respondents (N=200) showed that students do intend to use social media for collaborative learning but, there are also several other factors such as intention, interactivity, engagement that plays an important role in creating a desirable collaborative learning experience. Thus, this research concludes that social media can indeed be utilised as an educational tool with the purpose of assisting students to collaborate and interact effectively with their educators when provided with proper direction.