Who’s Viewing My Post? Extending the Imagined Audience Process Model Toward Affordances and Self-Disclosure Goals on Social Media

Abstract

This study investigates how individuals use the imagined audience to navigate context collapse and self-presentational concerns on Instagram. Drawing on the imagined audience process model, we analyze how structural (i.e., social media affordances) and individual factors (i.e., self-disclosure goals) impact the imagined audience composition along four dimensions: size, diversity, specificity, and perceived closeness. In a retrospective diary study of U.S. Instagram users, we compared the imagined audiences on Instagram posts versus Stories (n = 1,270). Results suggested that channel ephemerality predicted a less diverse and less close imagined audience; however, channel ephemerality interacted with self-disclosure goals to predict imagined audience composition. Imagined audience closeness was positively related to disclosure intimacy, but size, diversity, and specificity were unassociated. This study advances communication theory by describing how affordances and disclosure goals intersect to predict the imagined audience construction and online self-presentation.