Just between us: Exclusive communications in online social networks

ABSTRACT

Social media websites such as Facebook are used for relationship development and maintenance often through self-disclosure and sharing of personal information. However, not all forms of social media communication may be equally suitable for this task. This paper explores users’ norms about the appropriateness of using private vs. public Facebook messages to communicate different kinds of personal information, and the effectiveness of these types of communication in building relationships. Study 1, a survey, revealed that users endorse conflicting expectations about preferences for receiving information publicly or privately. Study 2, a field experiment testing the effects of private versus public Facebook communications on actual relationship development using participants’ own Facebook pages, suggested that private messages lead to greater closeness.

KEYWORDS:

• Communication norms
• exclusivity
• online communication
• relationships

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/g3dfy/

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/g3dfy/

Notes

1. Materials and data for Study 1 are available at the Open Science Framework, https://osf.io/g3dfy/​

2. In addition to the two experimental conditions described above, the methods originally included a condition (n = 18) in which participants were simply instructed to pay attention to their classmates’ Facebook communication. However, in retrospect, the vagueness of these instructions rendered this condition theoretically useless: We have no information about what Facebook activity these participants performed. For this reason, the ratings for participants in this condition are not included in this paper’s analysis.

3. A number of participants refrained from answering these questions, despite rating their liking and closeness for their classmates. A total of 87 ratings included appropriateness and encouragement scores (55 in the private message condition), 85 ratings included liking scores (53 in the private message condition), and 93 ratings included personalness scores (58 in the private message condition).