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Social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and StudiVZ are popular means of communicating personality. Recent theoretical and empirical considerations of homepages and Web 2.0 platforms show that impression management is a major motive for actively participating in social networking sites. However, the factors that determine the specific form of self-presentation and the extent of self-disclosure on the Internet have not been analyzed. In an exploratory study, we investigated the relationship between self-reported (offline) personality traits and (online) self-presentation in social networking profiles. A survey among 58 users of the German Web 2.0 site, StudiVZ.net, and a content analysis of the respondents’ profiles showed that self-efficacy with regard to impression management is strongly related to the number of virtual friends, the level of profile detail, and the style of the personal photo. The results also indicate a slight influence of extraversion, whereas there was no significant effect for self-esteem.

Nowadays anyone can appear in the media and “broadcast” himself or herself to the globalized world; the opportunities for ordinary people to present themselves, their pictures, their videos, or their ideas have grown dramatically in the past decade. By means of the World Wide Web, any user with minimal knowledge of Internet technology is able to reach a potentially huge audience. According to Dominick (1999), personal homepages turn average users, who are normally consumers of conventional media like TV, radio, or newspapers, into “producers of mass communication content.” In the past few years, this trend has become a widespread phenomenon with numerous different applications; Internet users write public blogs and publish private photos (for example on www.flickr.com) or videos (www.youtube.com). These “interactive” Internet sites with millions of users are referred to as “Web...