Social media served as communication tools for international students to deal with multiple social relationships. Compared with most of existing studies exploring how the media practices of international students on a single platform affect their identity construction, this paper pushes this research field ahead in two fronts: firstly, instead of focusing only on one platform, this study investigates how those students distribute different social media; Secondly, by introducing the concept of "life transition", it examines how the perception of self-identity affects students’ use of social media. This study, with interviews with 20 Chinese overseas students, tries to summarize the distribution differences of social media platforms of three types of students, namely, students who regard overseas-study experience as an instrument for their future gaining, students with good integration in local cultures, and students only focusing on enriching their personal experiences. Then, it further analyzes such differences in the context of life transitions. Theoretically, this study also responds to and advocates the view of “non-media centric media studies".