Philip Wride – Social Media Marketer and Community Manager

Here comes the final part of this three part article looking at some of the web metrics that are important in measuring the development and health of your community. This one focuses on those communities 1.5 years or older and those that have gone past the “mid-growth” stage as they have a few thousand users.

The title suggests Loyalty, Visitors and Activity are three key elements and they definitely are but if your community has got this far there is also something else I’d like to throw into the mix and that’s Recency. If your community is in a comfortable position in that there is a good level of activity, users are coming back and new visitors are finding their way to you then recency can help determine how engaged they are.

As part of your strategy you should be looking at ways of keeping users engaged and wanting more and finding the most effective way of doing this will largely depend on the time of community you have. Do they like to talk about general topics outside of the core reason for the community (e.g. brand / product)? Are they creative and generating new ideas? Is there something like a project or hobby that has caught their attention? These are all questions that can help you pave the way for increasing the levels of engagement and therefore the recency stat.

If I was to set an aim it would be to try and get a community to a stage where a user feels they need to check in once in the morning and once when they get back from work. This may be to gather the latest information, check what was discussed overnight or converse with a peer group they’ve established. Whatever the reason it’s important to help facilitate this by giving them the space and tools to do so. If you can establish their feeling of needing to check in then it means they are more likely to see any key messaging you put into the community and through this the potential to purchase.

From using chartbeat (mentioned in Part 1) in my current position I’ve seen a spike in concurrent users at roughly the same time every Wednesday; when a weekly announcement is made. Armed with this knowledge I’m more likely to try and post related topics or useful information in and around this time as I know there is a greater chance for users to actively engage with it and take action.

Quite a long article for Part 3 and the key message is, if your community has got to this stage, don’t neglect Loyalty, Visitors and Activity, these are all still core elements of ensuring your community succeeds, but if you have an established audience then look at ways to encourage them to come back more often.