Anna Knutson, PhD

Case Study: Cross-platform social media use

This case study draws on my dissertation research, a two-year longitudinal study of how eight college students communicated across social media platforms and academic contexts. I found that users are more sophisticated communicators than they realize, strategically managing audiences, shifting tone and persona by platform, and adapting knowledge across contexts when faced with unfamiliar challenges. The cross-platform, longitudinal study design surfaced behavioral patterns that could not be found in single-platform or one-time studies.

After defending my dissertation and earning my PhD, I also published a peer-reviewed journal article and a peer-reviewed book chapter drawing on this data.

Context

Writing studies is a subfield of English that conducts empirical, human subject research (both quantitative and qualitative) about how people communicate in a range of contexts.

Many writing studies scholars are especially interested in the intersection between technology and communication. This is where my research lived. For example, while in my MA program, I co-founded an online, multimedia writing program at the University of New Mexico and co-authored three peer-reviewed articles about this process. I also designed and led a study about youth vlogging practices on YouTube. In my PhD program, I took coursework in educational technology and multimedia composition, and I completed a dissertation, a peer-reviewed article, and a peer-reviewed book chapter about young people’s social media uses across platforms. As a professor, I taught a doctoral-level seminar entitled Social Media Literacies and Rhetorics.

Problem

At the time that I designed and conducted my dissertation research (2016-2018), social media was still relatively young.

We knew from observation that young people were writing more than ever. We also knew that they were doing sophisticated things online, such as managing audiences across platforms, adapting their voices for different contexts and audiences, and building knowledge through social media. Despite this general understanding, the field had very limited empirical data explaining how these practices worked, and how these practices might inform their communication in other contexts, such as school.

Methods

As a result, I designed a longitudinal study exploring how eight young people communicated on a range of social media platforms.

To learn from young people who are engaged in focused writing in online environments, I recruited undergraduate students at the University of Michigan who were involved in identity-focused student organizations. I distributed a Qualtrics survey to members of 10 student organizations, and I received 48 responses. From these respondents, I selected eight participants to collect qualitative data from.

Data collection consisted of four interviews over the course of two years and the ongoing collection of academic and online writing samples over the course of one academic year.

Analysis consisted of grounded theory, a type of inductive thematic analysis, where I coded the data and built themes inductively rather than organizing by participant.

Insights

1. People compartmentalize their communication practices across contexts, but they break that pattern under specific conditions.

Most participants in the study kept their online and academic communication in separate mental buckets. They didn’t perceive their social media writing as “real” writing, and they rarely felt that skills from one context applied to the other. One participant described the separation bluntly: “That’s just a different brain.”

However, when they encountered an unfamiliar communication challenge, such as a new platform, a new genre, or an ill-defined task, they sometimes reached across that divide and adapted what they knew from another context. This typically happened when two conditions aligned: the new situation felt familiar enough to a previous one, and the participant lacked other resources to draw on. These connections weren’t automatic; rather, they were a resourceful response to a gap in their knowledge.

2: Social media users are sophisticated, strategic communicators, and online communication is more complex than most realize.

Even when participants weren’t consciously transferring knowledge across contexts, they demonstrated nuanced platform awareness and communication strategies, including:

Tone and voice shifting across platforms. Participants maintained distinct personas on different platforms, stating that they were more formal on Facebook, more openly emotional on Twitter, and more visual and curated on Instagram. One participant noted, “I get a lot more angry on Twitter than I do on Facebook. On Facebook, I feel a lot more pressure to be eloquent, to be calm.”
Audience management. They actively curated who could see what by using privacy settings, platform selection, and even pseudonymous accounts as tools for managing audience exposure. This wasn’t passive; it was deliberate impression management across platforms.
Multimedia fluency. Participants understood intuitively that different platforms favor different media: that Twitter’s constraints push toward GIFs and images, that Instagram is inherently visual, that a long-form argument belongs on a blog rather than in a caption. They were making sophisticated rhetorical decisions about form and medium, even without formal training in it.
Hashtags and emoji as rhetorical tools. Participants used hashtags not just for discoverability, but to situate their content within broader conversations and communities. Emoji functioned as tonal signals, softening, emphasizing, or adding register that plain text couldn’t carry.
Anxiety about visibility. Going public carried real perceived risk. Participants described strategies for containing their writing, such as limiting audiences, avoiding controversy, choosing platforms where they felt safer. These approaches demonstrated a sophisticated (if sometimes defensive) awareness of how digital communication can travel beyond its intended context.

Impact

Academic implications

This research contributed two previously underexplored concepts: adaptive re-mediation across digital contexts, and inventional transfer, or the way that knowledge built through informal online reading can fuel formal academic writing.

The cross-platform, longitudinal design also offered the field something methodologically rare: empirical data on how the same writers behave across multiple platforms over time, rather than a snapshot of behavior on a single platform at a single moment.

Implications for product research

While this research was conducted in an academic context, the behavioral patterns it surfaces are directly relevant to anyone studying how people communicate in digital environments.

Cross-platform research reveals what single-platform research cannot. Product research is almost always scoped to one product or one platform. This research, which followed the same participants across Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and academic writing contexts, surfaced patterns that would be invisible in a single-platform study. It revealed that tone and persona shift systematically by platform, that audience management is a holistic practice spanning multiple tools, and that what users do on one platform is shaped in part by what they do everywhere else.
Longitudinal depth changes what you can see. Two years with the same participants revealed compartmentalization not as a momentary attitude but as a durable behavioral pattern, and made it possible to identify the specific conditions under which that pattern breaks down. While product research is understandably scoped for rapid timelines, longitudinal research can illuminate how user behaviors evolve (or persist) over time.
Users’ persistent anxieties about privacy and safety should always stay front-of-mind for product teams. Participants in this study were more sophisticated communicators than they gave themselves credit for, but anxiety about visibility, audience complexity, and perceived risk made them second guess what they could or could not say in online contexts. The anxiety they expressed about privacy underscores the importance of clarity and consistency around privacy settings in consumer communication products.