Pursuing higher education in a foreign country entails numerous challenges and opportunities for development for international students. Social media allows individuals adapting to a new environment to connect, communicate, collaborate, network, and learn, overcoming geographical, temporal, linguistic, cultural, and social boundaries. In this study, I explored how international graduate students used social media to seek support for acculturation and academic integration, as well as their perceptions of the benefits and challenges of using social media for support-seeking. I employed a naturalistic multiple-case study design to investigate this phenomenon relating to international graduate students' acculturation and academic integration with social media. I selected participants through snowball and purposeful sampling. The inclusion criteria included that students were in the same university, had finished their first year of study in their academic program, and used social media regularly for support-seeking. The primary inclusion criterion was that students had spent their first year of study in their educational program and used social media regularly for support-seeking. I balanced participant samples based on demographic backgrounds, including country of origin, field of study, and gender, to understand diverse students' experiences. Participants were eleven international graduate students from seven countries studying in education, social science, humanities, and STEM programs, with an average age of 27. Data were collected through two semi-structured interviews via Zoom and ten participant-generated digital artifacts via Padlet from each participant depicting their use of social media for acculturation and academic integration. Data were transcribed, cleaned, and anonymized before data analysis. I adopted inductive and deductive thematic analysis, guided by Activity Systems Analysis (ASA), as the analytic framework for my data analysis. I used the qualitative data analysis software NVivo to facilitate data analysis. The study findings revealed that international graduate participants' primary objectives for using social media were to receive emotional and social support, manage daily and academic tasks, and integrate into their local and academic communities. Participants used a mix of home-country and U.S. social media platforms, with some employing a wide range of platforms and web services and others opting for a few selective ones. Participants purposefully tailored social media platforms to suit the groups of people they interacted with, the tasks they addressed, and their personal preferences and topics at hand. The advantages of using social media for support-seeking included affordability, convenience, vast access to information, and extended social and incidental learning opportunities. However, several tensions arose from negative experiences, such as emotional distress related to social media engagement, with some intensified by algorithms designed for mindless scrolling. Commonly reported tensions included digital distractions, compulsive use of social media, and mindless scrolling. Other tensions included varying information quality and limited access to different language information sources. Accordingly, implications for practice and future research were discussed, including implementing social media curricula to support students' effective use of social media for personal and professional goals while adapting to their new cultural and educational environment. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be obtained by Telephone (800) 1-800-521-0600. Web page: http://bibliotheek.ehb.be:2222/en-US/products/dissertations/individuals.shtml.]