The importance of online communities is evident to many brands. What isn’t so obvious is how you set objectives for the community and, then, how you develop a framework to measure this.
What you measure depends on what you have set out to achieve. If awareness is the objective, then size does matter – the number of community members will count. If you’re hoping to crowdsource innovative ideas, then the quality of the contribution is more important than the quantity.
If you’re a community manager, here are some online community metrics that you might find useful:
1. Awareness
• Size of community
• Growth of community
• Links to your community
2. Engagement
• Proportion of members that contribute
• Changes in activity on a weekly/monthly basis
• Number of comments on content
• Speed of response to new content
• Tone of comments
• Amount of content contributed by community membership
• Quality and relevance of content contributed
• Community interactivity and, particularly, interactivity without brand intervention
• Length of time spent on the site
• Use of other functions, such as on-site search, within the community
• Click through rates on links
3. Loyalty
• Conversion from visitor to member
• Frequency of return
• Number of members leaving the community
• Need for moderation or intervention from the community manager
• Positive sentiment
4. Recruitment
• Sharing of content from the community
• Mentions of the community on social media
• Efficacy of any referral or recommendation mechanisms
• Traffic sources
5. Quality
• Match of community demographics to target audience demographics
• Relevance of content contributed
• Ideas and insights provided through contributions
• Response to call to actions
What would you add to this list?
