“It’s Not Who You Know, but Who You Add:” An investigation into the differential impact of friend adding and self-disclosure on interpersonal perceptions on Facebook

•We manipulated SNS profiles to see how it impacts the relational process.•Adding a friend to one’s network led to feelings of interpersonal liking.•Level of self-disclosure impacted feelings of homophily and liking.•These main effects are impacted by both participant sex and SNS profile owner sex.

This research seeks to understand how people perceive and respond to structural factors and different types of disclosure on Facebook when evaluating the profile of someone they have never met offline. Using a 2 × 3 × 2 between-subjects experimental design, this research explored the relationship between friend adding (add; no add), levels of self-disclosure (low, medium, high), and sex of the Facebook profile owner (male; female) on feelings of interpersonal liking, future behavioral intentions to interact, and homophily. Results indicated that friend adding and higher levels of self-disclosure led to greater feelings of interpersonal liking and homophily amongst both male and female participants. In addition, males tended to view other male profiles with moderate amounts of disclosure and female profiles with the highest amount of disclosure most favorably. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.