Posting, blocking, double profiles: audience segmentation on Facebook

As social network sites are becoming more populated and users more diverse, impression management on these sites has become more complicated. Users face challenges as they attempt to perform a unified identity to a diverse audience. The article discusses some of the strategies Hungarian teenage users of Facebook apply to deal with this situation. Drawing on data coming from two focus group interviews and a representative survey (N = 612) with Hungarian secondary school students, strategies of selecting ‘friends’, curating posts, blocking and deleting ‘friends’ and creating double profiles on Facebook are discussed. It is concluded that there are significant differences in the use of these strategies according to different user groups as off-line inequalities influence online impression management in different ways.

The analyses showed that Hungarian youth maintain a very diverse group as friend on Facebook. The nature of the friend group and the action which one take when maintaining Facebook friends are connected with some demographic variables, namely gender, social and minority status. 'Groups of higher social status thus tend to behave differently from groups of lower social status. The more conscious posting behaviour of students of higher social status suggests that they interpret FB as a basically public, front stage space, where they are constructing a carefully monitored public persona for the generalized other present in the form of a great diversity of friends. The frequent use of unfriending and double profiles by members of the lower status groups, on the other hand, suggests that they understand FB as a private, back stage space where they attempt to construct more private personas for specific others, the more carefully selected peers.' Nóra Schleicher: Posting, blocking, double profiles: audience segmentation on Facebook, International Journal of Pedagogy, Innovation and New Technologies, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2018, page: 30