The present study investigates how people communicate everyday emotional distress and seek emotional support on social network sites. Although previous studies have shown that people receive necessary social support when they engage in online social networking, there is a lack of research on how people produce support-seeking messages to be shared on social network sites and how consideration of multiple goals shapes the composition of those messages. Employing the theoretical framework of multiple goals, this study investigates whether people pursue multiple goals when they seek emotional support on social network sites, and whether they compose support-seeking messages to address different goals simultaneously. It further examines whether the severity of the stressful situation and the expected publicity of the support-seeking message influence the amount of effort people put into message composition, and whether this degree of effort predicts the production of sophisticated messages that address multiple goals effectively. The present study employed a two (problem severity: low vs. high) by two (publicity of message: public vs. private) between-subjects design. A laboratory experiment with 176 college student participants shows that people's communication goals change depending on the publicity of their message, and that people's levels of effort in message composition in computer-mediated communication (CMC) increase as the severity of the problem increases. Results also suggest that the effect of the problem's severity on CMC message composition time is moderated by the publicity of the message, such that the effect of the problem severity on CMC message composition time is greater when people use a public SNS channel as opposed to a private SNS channel to communicate a stressful situation. Finally, the more effort people put into CMC message composition, the more likely they are to produce a sophisticated support-seeking message that serves multiple communication goals. The finding from this study contributes to the theoretical advancement of social support and supportive communication in general, and provides new insights to the body of knowledge on how people utilize social network sites to seek emotional support. It suggests that support seekers can pursue and address multiple goals when they seek emotional support from others, and that the affordances of social network sites can amplify the impression management goal, which further contributes to the dynamics of supportive communication and shapes the quality of the emotional support exchanged on social network sites.
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