Academic online portals of Learning Management System (LMS) and social media have become a necessity in many higher education institutions to tie classroom meetings with learning resources. This study examines Malaysian university students' preferences of social media and LMS for academic purposes. A set of questionnaires was distributed to 269 students at four Malaysian universities. The results show that the students preferred both social media and e-learning for academic purposes, although their interest in social media was slightly higher than that of e-learning. The students had a higher regard for the academic content shared with them, than the design of a social media or e-learning platform. This suggests that both social media and e-learning are highly suitable to be used in academic environment to cater to students' need for formal-informal learning.