Who’s my audience again? Understanding audience management strategies for designing privacy management technologies

•We clarify the relationship between privacy management and invisible audiences.•We use card sorting to understand audience management strategies.•The data outlines five audience management strategies.•The data indicates that the participants rely heavily on community roles when managing their audience.

Social network site users are often confronted with invisible audiences. Although various settings for managing audiences are available, we argue that these do not always match the users’ interpretations. This study explores the audience-management strategies of 18 young adults when categorizing their (invisible) audiences in Facebook, using card sorting as a research method. Approximately 1254 out of 1800 people (cards) were categorized based on the shared-community strategy, in which the participants referred to multiple community roles. The theoretical framework of Symbolic Interactionism and the Communication Privacy Management Theory are used to frame the problematic nature of invisible audiences. Implications for designing privacy-management technologies are discussed.