Relational maintenance on social network sites: How Facebook communication predicts relational escalation

•Analyzes actual Facebook communication traces between 1544 friendships.•Extends understanding of how SNSs support new types of relational maintenance.•Escalation is associated with recent, frequent, and varied Facebook communication.•Linguistic content of communication is not related to relational escalation.

Social network sites are popular communication tools that help people maintain relationships with their friends, yet there has been little research examining how people use these tools to enact relationship maintenance. By analyzing communication between individual friendships on a popular social network site, Facebook, this research examines types of maintenance behaviors enacted on the site, and how they predict relational escalation of Facebook friendships. Results show that most relationships go through a gradual rather than an extreme change and that these changes reflect both relational escalation and de-escalation. Temporal patterns—more recent and more frequent communication—predict relationship escalation, as does use of more different types of communication within Facebook, particularly private messages and photo tags. However, enactment of traditional relationship maintenance strategies as captured by the linguistic analysis of Facebook communication content using LIWC does not predict relationship escalation. These findings contribute to our theoretical understanding of the ways that the functionality of social network sites can help users engage in new types of relationship maintenance.