3 Secrets to Measuring Success in Your Online Community

Let’s say you’ve launched your blog and are ready to understand more about your audience. How do you determine the most important metrics for your community?

The old way of marketing said that visitors were all potential customers. It attached visitor actions to a definitive revenue goal, and conversion rates were based on this Point A to Point B method. Often, communication with these customers beyond the sale was not a strong consideration, if at all.

However, today we expect to have more understanding of how a product works in our life, possibly quite early in the buying cycle, and we need more than a large Buy Now button to get us interested. We want to know what others think about the product and what their experience has been. Thus, the value of blogs and online communities. If you’re now managing a community or planning one, understanding Return On Engagement metrics, as well as Return on Investment metrics will have notable impact on the longevity, activity, cohesion, and profitability of your community.

I’ve assembled a list of 3 tips that any blog owner or community manager can use to measure both definitive and qualitative impact.

Secret #1 : Analyze Community Dynamics

The first secret of analyzing your community is learning about the members. If your blog is targeted to say, moms in a specified geographical area whose husbands are airline pilots, don’t automatically assume that such tight targeting will mean they all have the same motivations – they won’t. Learn what they are. And focus on offering them what they want.

A good way to do this is to ask them, but everyone hates surveys, and you may not get enough information to make an informed decision about improving your community in specific ways. One of the easiest and most effective ways is to simply watch how members engage with each other. Who are your community influencers? How can they help create cohesion in the community? Which members are getting shut down and not heard? What ways can you reach out to them? Why do most people join your community? To build social links, or because the community brand appealed to them?

To ensure a robust community, really come to understand your member’s lives and how they relate to one another. This is important stuff.

Secret #2 : Analyze Community Cohesion

Closely related to Secret #1 is community cohesion. How does your community identify itself? Communities are social units chosen because an individual identifies with the members there and shares a sense of “we-ness” with them. Not all people will socially fit into your community. That being the case, look for opportunities to strengthen unity within your community, create a sense of contrast with other communities, and create camaraderie around a shared mission.

Example: PepsiWeInspire.com brought women of color together from all walks of life to share their beauty, wisdom and inspiration with each other, and in the process fight long entrenched industry ideals of beauty.

Secret #3: Analyze Your Community Traffic Data

Now that you’ve put the needs of people first in your community analysis and planning, consider the next step taking a more data-driven approach to help you develop and meet conversion metrics. Make sure to always think in terms of people before tools, and when it’s time to use tools, consider these analytics:

• Search engine ranking
• Social bookmarking activity
• Video/podcast views/listens
• Inbound links
• Technorati rankings
• Blog trackbacks
• RSS subscriptions
• Blog comments on your blog
• Active commenting on complimentary blogs
• Visitors (first-time and repeat)
• Visitor paths
• Referrers
• Size of community – daily signups/logins

This is clearly just the tip of the iceberg of what it takes to effectively measure success in your community, but it’s a great starting point for the kind of attitude it takes to make your community truly worth spending time at. What’s important is that you focus on the member’s needs first because there are countless other networks where they can choose to spend their time.

Setting your analytics focus on putting members first pays off dividends in helping you learn how to win members over, develop a clear idea of the kinds of experiences you want to provide, and illustrate each day why your blog or community is the place to be.

Ghennipher Weeks is a Startup Princess Fairy Godmother and a principal at Cindikate, a consultancy that helps companies who market to women create effective lifestyle brand communities. Ghennipher’s background includes a decade of public speaking and consulting corporate clients in search marketing and online conversion, with 5 of those years focused specifically on online brand communities and corporate blogs. Her forthcoming community management book, to be released by Humans and Technology, gives tactical advice to companies seeking to create groups of ardent customers organized around a brand’s lifestyle.