How to measure social capital in an online brand community? A comparison of three social capital scales

Abstract

Despite that social capital is widely used to explain social interactions and networking on social media, there is no consensus on the measurement of social capital, and successful assessment is difficult. To address this issue, this research presents an empirical comparison of three different social capital scales in the context of online brand communities: Chiu et al.’s six sub-dimensional model (2006), Lin and Lu’s three-dimensional model (2011), and Williams’s two-dimension model (2006). Results indicate that social capital in an online brand community environment mainly consists of three dimensions, including social interaction ties, trust, and shared value, lending support for Lin and Lu’s scale over the others. Our investigation of social capital scales provides managerial and theoretical implications by identifying and validating context-specific measures of social capital.