“Just Cast the Net, and Hopefully the Right Fish Swim into It”: Audience Management on Social Network Sites

When users post on social network sites, they can engage in audience-reaching strategies, in an effort to reach desired audience members, as well as audience-limiting strategies, in an effort to avoid unwanted audience members. While much research has focused on users' audience-limiting strategies, little research has explicitly focused on users' audience-reaching strategies. Additionally, little work has explored either strategy at the post level. Using mixed methods involving a diary study and follow-up interviews focused on a diverse group of users' posts, this article reveals several audience-reaching strategies users engaged from altering their content to tagging. However, users in this study rarely used strategies to exclude people proactively and technologically outside of their targeted audiences, and instead broadcasted widely. Participants described several rationales for sharing broadly from skill-related issues to a reliance on the audience or site to filter the content.