ASSESSING VALIDITY AND INTERNAL CONSISTENCY OF THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING COMMUNICATION MEASUREMENT SCALES

Social media platforms are increasingly becoming important channels for disseminating effective and interactive brand-related communications between brand managers and consumers. Previous researchers have categorized social media brand-related contents into Firm-Created Contents (FCC) and User-Generated Contents (UGC). However, researchers are yet to consider delving into the differential functions of these contents as marketing communications. As such, this paper identifies four types of marketing communications on social media; advertising, sales promotion, interactive marketing and word-of-mouth and evaluates the validity and reliability of the scales for measuring social media marketing communications. The Content Validity Index (CVI) of both the items-level and the scale-level CVIs from the ratings of seven (7) experts revealed that the items in the scale proposed have good content validity. Furthermore, with the use of the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) with Varimax rotation, it was revealed that from the 34 items used to measure the social media marketing communications, a total of 28 items were retained. Finally, the findings also demonstrate that all four scales of social media advertising, promotions, interactive marketing and word-of-mouth have acceptable values of reliability.