You Ask, I Answer: Social Media Community Manager Metrics and KPIs?

In today's episode, Jessica asks, I have some community managers on my team and I want to set some KPIs for them in 2020. What are good objectives for your community management team outside of response time? So response time, response time sounds like it's a customer service measure more than it is community management. When we thought think about community management, are we talking just customer service, which is a form of community management, or are we talking about also nurturing and growing an actual community? Something like in a Slack group or a Discord group, uh a Facebook group if you had to.

If that's the case, then you have a very different type of community management uh set of measures than you do for just plain customer service. Plain customer service is pretty straightforward. You have response time, you have uh net positive outcome, net negative outcome, you probably have a surveying tool of some kind, and so you're looking at NPS scores. Uh what is the likelihood that you would make another purchase from this organization in the next 90 days, scale of one to five. What is the likelihood you'll recommend this company to your friends, colleagues, whatever, scale of one to five.

Those are pretty straightforward measures. And for customer service, they make a lot of sense. For community management, think about what the goal of community management is. The goal is loyalty and evangelism, right? You want people to trust you, you want people to stick around, and you want people to tell other people about your company, your products, your services, and the community itself.

So the nice thing is with a lot of digital communities, particularly things like Slack, um uh Discord, uh, even yeah, Facebook groups. If you have some of those LinkedIn groups, all of these services do have things you can measure, right? So look at a few things for community management. Number one is activity in the community itself, how much activity is there? Umagers have an important job of getting a community started and then keeping that community going, adding uh adding fuel to the fire, as it were, keeping the fires lit.

Uh it's a is a lot of work, very difficult, and like any fire, like you leave your campfire out overnight and you don't put new wood on it, it will eventually go out. The same is true of a community. Uh so you want to look at those activity numbers. You want to look at uh retention rates, how many people join or leave your community? Uh depending on the software you're using, you may be able to actually track individual joints and quits, and you want to measure that.

That's churn. How fast is your community growing? How fast is are people leaving? Uh, you see this a lot in the email marketing world, for example. You can see what your unsubscribes are.

Uh so measuring churn would be important. Uh, communities organic growth, meaning growth without paying money for it. Uh, people referring people to your community. So, uh, for example, with Slack, there's a tool that we use at Trust Insights called uh community inviter, and it allows you to set up a landing page where people can invite themselves into the Slack community, which is nice, but you can also have people invite uh friends and colleagues uh right within the interface, and so you can measure those and see are people just coming into the front door, or are people saying, Hey, you know, co-workers, come join this community. This is super useful to me.

So, those would be examples of things that you would want to measure. Ultimately, though, your community management efforts should show up in your marketing analytics. So again, for uh something like Slack, when I post links to our Analytics for Marketers Slack community, I make sure I UTM tag them using Google Analytics tracking codes. And then I can see in my web analytics how many people went from the Slack community to the resource I was pointing at. And then did they go through and convert?

Did they uh convert? Did they buy something? Did they become a client? Uh for example, there's uh a couple of folks in our Slack group that have become paying clients, and uh the ROI i in the beginning of the community was nothing, and now the ROI is astronomical because those efforts paid off over time. But it's a lot like farming, uh, and that's something to be aware of in your KPIs.

Until the day you harvest your crops, your return on your effort is uh effectively zero, right? It takes a really long time for uh an ear of corn to grow. What seventy-five, ninety days? Uh so for the the that first period of time, people would be saying, like, where's the ROI on this one? It's gonna be a while.

And the more complex, the more expensive, the higher risk your product or services, the longer your sales cycle. Now, you may have, for example, if you sell chewing gum, you will have a relatively low risk uh product, right? And so your overall sales cycle is probably fairly short, and being able to demonstrate some level of ROI will not take five years, right? But set the expectation with community management that the ROI is long, it's longer than uh other marketing methods typically, but it is in the long run higher. So help set those expectations as well.

So that's a that's a whole bunch of different metrics. What I would do is I would map out a a community journey uh map of the stages somebody can take to as they become a community member from awareness to joining the community to becoming an active participant to becoming an evangelist of the community and then measure along those stages with how many people in your community are in each of those places. Use that as a way of benchmarking not only the success of your community management efforts but also where are things most broken. You have no trouble getting people to join your community but it's tough getting them to participate actively. In that case you know that perhaps you need a uh a different voice in the community uh maybe as long as you're not a one person show uh maybe you need to have uh some ambassadors or something like that to change the tone and tenor of the conversation so lots to think about map those things out and uh and and give it a shot uh if you have follow up questions please leave them in the comments box below as always please subscribe to the YouTube channel and to the newsletter and we'll talk to you soon take care.

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