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This study investigated the writing performance of 19 participants on two social media networks (Renren and Facebook) and how social media can influence their writing performance. Participants in this study, 12 students from Shanghai International Studies University (SISU) and 7 Worldlearning students from China, were asked to fill out two questionnaires and complete four writing assignments on different themes over a period of 3 months. The dependent variables are the following: text productivity, syntactic accuracy, sentence complexity and spelling mistakes. The results show that neither the accuracy nor the productivity of students' texts can be greatly improved after using social media as a study platform over a period of 3 months and that the number of spelling mistakes made while writing with social media is higher than when students write in a traditional classroom context. What does improve is the complexity of the sentences students write. These findings, together with the feedback from the participants provide us with evidence that learning writing with social media still has a positive effect on writing performance. Furthermore, we find that teacher interventions are needed to correct errors in students' texts so as to help students improve their writing. What is more important is that students should be encouraged to interact with peers as much as possible so that they can acquire what they haven't mastered yet from reading others' texts. Keywords: improved writing performance, social media, interaction