Social interaction in the modern world is gradually moving into the information space, where, on the basis of the user’s profile, a “virtual personality image” is formed. In modern psychology, this concept has not been sufficiently developed, so the aim of the article was to analyze the structural elements of the composition the “virtual personality image”, to determine its elements, characteristics, and features. The author analyzes the main factors affecting the construction of a virtual user’s image of the social network. The article considers motivational, affective, value and other factor components that influence the choice of strategy in the user's self-presentation in the Internet space. The author of the article describes modern theories linking self-identification of a person with the formation of his/her image in a social network. Based on the analysis of Russian social networks – VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and My World, the main subsystems, key structural elements, tools and other components are identified that are directly formative in the structural composition of the virtual personality image. The author notes that the virtual personality image is a complex and multidimensional structure, which has its own structural composition, structural components and a set of tools. In the course of the study, the following factors were identified that influence the formation of the structural composition of a virtual image: dissatisfaction with their real images, self-identification crisis, wide opportunities for fulfilling their desires and needs, anonymity, a large amount of ready-made template information for creating an image. The determining elements of the structural composition of a virtual image are its linguistic, graphic, audio, and rating subsystems. The totality of these subsystems forms the main meaning built up by the user-carrier and other users. Reading a virtual image occurs by analyzing both a single image unit (subsystem) and their combination. The author notes the adoption by society of new artificially created virtual images, even if it is impossible to correlate it with the real image of the carrier as one of the most striking characteristics of constructing a virtual image.