Making friends and communicating on Facebook: Implications for the access to social capital

•Exaggerated posting and friending behavior are likely to deteriorate social capital.•Other than expected, briding social capital decreases with network size.•Homophily is stronger in communication networks than in friendship networks.•Addressed posts contribute more reliably to social capital than “broad-casting”.

In this paper, we explore the dynamics of access to social capital on Facebook. Existing approaches to network-based social capital measures are adapted to the case of Facebook and applied to the friendship and communication data of 438,851 users. These measures are correlated to user data in order to identify advantageous behavior for optimizing the possible access to social capital. We find that the access to social capital on Facebook is primarily based on a reasonable amount of active communication. Exaggerated friending and posting behavior can deteriorate the access to social capital. Furthermore, we investigate which kinds of posts are most advantageous as well as questions of homophily based on social capital.