1 Forthcoming in Mildorf, J. & Thomas, B. (eds.) Dialogue across media. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Friends and followers ‘in the know’: A narrative interactional approach to social media participation Alexandra Georgakopoulou (King’s College London) 1. Introduction Interactional approaches to everyday conversations, both bi‑ and multi‑party ones, have amply documented the systematicity of sequential phenomena to be found within turn‑ taking as well as their close links with participant roles and relations. Furthermore, they have shown how any pre‑allocated telling rights and rules (e.g. in institutional contexts involving asymmetrical relations between participants) may be visibly oriented to, managed or departed from by the participants with their exploitation of conversational structures (for an overview, see Wooffitt & Hutchby 1998). In similar vein, participation frameworks (Goffman 1981), i.e. the roles and statuses assumed by interlocutors in the course of a conversation, have been found to be shaped by the type of discourse activity underway, for instance, the telling of a story, as we will see below. Finally, participants’ differential degrees of knowledge and expertise in the topic at hand are also linked with who contributes what and how. A comparable interactional approach to social media communication is lagging behind, despite the fact that much of the social media pre‑designing is specifically aimed at