How is language used to craft social presence in Facebook? A case study of an undergraduate writing course Jessica Gordon # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract This quantitative content analysis examines the way social presence was created through original posts and comments in a Facebook group for an undergraduate writing course. The author adapted a well-known coding template and examined how course members—one instructor, two undergraduate teaching assistants and twenty- two students–used language and image to generate social presence. Language is categorized by purpose, and each category is a social presence indicator. The results show which social presence indicators are used more frequently by course members and that social presence is higher when certain social presence indicators are utilized. Since existing research indicates that social presence is associated with increased course satisfaction and learning, these findings provide practical knowledge for faculty seek- ing to increase social presence in their classes. This is a case study with a small population, but these results indicate the need for additional research to further explore how language and image are used to generate social presence in Facebook. Keywords Facebook . Social presence . Community of inquiry . Online learning 1 Introduction 1.1 The theory of social presence The theory of social presence, first developed by Short, Williams, and Christie (1976) in response to telecommunications debates, explains the effects a communication medium has on the way that people communicate. Short, Williams and Christie characterized “social presence” as the “degree of salience of the other person in the interaction and the consequent salience of the interpersonal relationships” (p. 65). They understood social presence to be how “real” a person seemed when communicating in a Educ Inf Technol DOI 10.1007/s10639-014-9366-0 J. Gordon (*) Department of Focused Inquiry, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1015 Floyd Avenue, Harris Hall 5175, Richmond, VA 23284, USA e-mail: jbgordon@vcu.edu