Development and Validation of the Social Media Capital Scale (SMC): A Brand New Measure for Online Social Capital

We conducted a series of studies in order to develop a tool to assess social media capital, that is, more specifically, individual confidence in the use of social media sites and in their application to maintain and increase social capital. In our first study, we created the social media capital (SMC) scale by adapting parts of two already existing instruments and administered it to 6935 people to test its psychometric properties and dimensionality. After having validated the SMC in its final 7-item form, we proceeded to assess its external validity in two subsequent studies, by testing it against measures for Internet self-efficacy (study 2; <a:math xmlns:a="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M1"> <a:mi>n</a:mi> <a:mo>=</a:mo> <a:mn>3100</a:mn> </a:math> ) and motives to use the Internet and social media addiction (study 3; <c:math xmlns:c="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" id="M2"> <c:mi>n</c:mi> <c:mo>=</c:mo> <c:mn>244</c:mn> </c:math> ). Overall, the SMC displayed satisfactory psychometric properties and appears to be a sound measure of social media capital.