Social media and community channels have altered the marketing paradigm. We have seen a huge transformation in how individuals interact with organizations, from viewing standalone ads on televisions a decade ago, to constant interaction with a company's journey through social media and community today. This paradigm shift has afforded an opportunity to companies who leverage channels like Twitter, Discord and Telegram to reduce customer acquisition and support costs, as well as improve user experience and retention.
It is crucial to establish KPIs to measure the health of your community and ensure you have a baseline on which you can improve. The most important of these metrics are:
Active Members: This is the number of unique community members sending messages in the community. This can be measured on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Weekly active members is the most popular time period we see at Blaze.
Total Engagements: For social media communities like Twitter, total engagements is the total volume of likes, shares, clicks, and replies to a post. For community channels, daily messages being sent is a better indicator of engagement. This KPI shows the response a brand's content and messaging receives, and indicate user interest in their story, purpose and product.
Engagement Rate: For social media communities like Twitter, engagement rate is the number of engagements on posts, such as replies and retweets, divided by number of impressions of any given piece of content. For community, the discord engagement stat should be daily or weekly messages divided by total community members. Community engagement rate is normally very low, given most community members just consume information without posting, but tracking changes over time is very helpful to inform strategy.
Sentiment Metrics: Measuring customer feeling towards a company's products and services is valuable, as it helps company's proactively address any budding issues and prevent customer churn. This means it is valuable to have an average sentiment metric, and keep track of this over time to be aware of any negative dips.
Retention: User retention metrics are crucial to monitor as they can help inform which community growth strategies are working best. 1 month and 3 month retention is calculated by counting how many users joined the community in a given time period, who were still active in the community one month and three months after they joined. If you are worried some marketing campaigns are bringing in bots, or low quality users, community retention metrics are a must to help you figure this out! If retention is super low, and there is little to no activity of new members, it is likely that campaign was not particularly high ROI.
New members and new followers: Tracking community growth is also key, and helps you have a tight feedback loop on what marketing strategies are most effective.
Response time: This is the time taken on average for a company to respond to a question or query. Long response times are an indicator of poor customer service, so keeping track of this can help with ensuring moderators and support agents are doing a good enough job.
Also read, The best platforms to host & build your online community
Growing and engaging your community is not easy, but great community management strategies reap great rewards. To keep improving strategy, understanding your key metrics and what strategies are driving the results you want to see is crucial. Having a one stop shop to help you experiment with growth strategies is highly recommended. If you need help establishing and keeping track of Discord stats and community metrics, you should check out our platform Blaze. We automatically track metrics like daily active members, engagement, sentiment, growth and retention across Discord and Twitter for you. Along with these out-of-the-box metrics, Blaze enables the identification of new trends and makes it easy to create automated reports and alerts.
To find out more about Blaze, schedule a demo with us.
