Facebook first post telling

•This paper applies Conversation Analysis to investigate Facebook status updates.•This papers focuses on the relation between Facebook status updates and the messages that follow them.•This paper shows that FB status updates normally consist of tellings.

In recent years Facebook (FB) has received increasing attention from scholars of different disciplines including ethnomethodology, sociology, education and communication. Despite the interest in FB, very few studies have investigated FB from a linguistic perspective. Moreover, none of these studies has applied Conversation Analysis (CA) to analyse FB status updates. This paper argues that, by adopting a CA-informed approach, status updates can be examined as tellings. In addition, it also claims that tellings can have five different formats: textual messages only, combinations of textual messages with either photos or hyperlinks, photos only or hyperlinks only.