Social media has reconfigured journalism practice and along this way it has transformed how journalists perceive professional identities. Journalists occupy the grey zone traversing the unprofessional forte, where they participate as ordinary citizens in giving commentary, while, on the other end, they use social media for professional communication. Premised on a conceptual framework consisting of liquid journalism and the social self-theory, and a qualitative methodology that combines semi-structured interviews with journalists and a virtual ethnography of social media posts, this study sought to understand how South African journalists perceive and negotiate their identities on social media. The findings of the study show that South African journalists perceive themselves differently on social media. While some journalists perceive themselves as individual citizens with rights to freely share their views on social media, other journalists still view themselves as professional journalists whose identities are tied to their media institutions on social media. They view social media as an extension of their professional practice. Our findings show that media institutions in South Africa lack comprehensive and coherent mechanisms to assist professional journalists to negotiate the tenuous and fluid identities arising from their participation on social media.