This study endeavors to examine the dynamics of impression management (IM) on social network sites (SNSs). In order to attract and retain users, a SNS would need to manage the services for active users to build impressions that one intends to deliver and also facilitate variant resonances by viewers to co-create a virtual reality in the society. Due to the lack of service development related information, service managers do not have a suitable analytic framework for the management of SNSs development. By examining the eight-year development of Facebook, we distinguished four stages of impression management differentiated by participation ratio (active user/viewer). The four stages are: audience base establishment, impression building, community impression building, and resonance expansion. The four stages of the IM lifecycle were then validated by industry experts and enriched by 10 longitudinally studied SNS cases. For each stage, different forms of impression building, types of resonance services, and indexes of impression reality were consolidated. Additionally, concerns for impression building were highlighted. Major findings are that impression management on SNSs is spontaneous, that both resonance and discordance on the site can initiate other cycles of impression building, and that the role of actor and audience are interchangeable and can easily evolve into group impression building. SNS services need to manage the evolving cycle of impression building throughout the service lifecycle and provide functions and activities to construct an effective mechanism for user-trustable impression-management processes. It is hoped that the elaboration of the IM lifecycle of social network services can provide strategic input into the cyclic innovative services.
