Quality Community Management Metrics

Quality Community Management Metric #1: Measuring Community Health

The community manager’s role is to get people to talk, share, and react to the brand in the social media communities. KPI or Key performance indicators  should be set for each social media community based on the brand’s objectives for that community and the community manager’s scope of work. Example metrics of community health (and therefore, the quality of the community manager’s output) are:

• Community Growth Metrics: Net new Likes, new followers, etc.
• Community Attrition Metrics: Unlikes, unfollows
• Mentions on Social Channels: tags, blog backlinks, blog comments, @replies and @mentions, etc.
• Engagement Metrics: Attrition rate, people talking about this, bounce rate, return visitors, etc.
• Content Analysis: Interaction rates ( [Likes + Comments + Shares] / Total Fans or [@replies + @mentions + RTs] / Followers), click-through rates,  blog posts shares, blog backlinks, etc.

Quality Community Management Metric #2: Tracking the Community Manager’s Deliverables

Furthermore, there are certain skills and tasks required of a community manager that we can track to ensure her or she is fulfilling the scope and meeting the brand needs.

It is better tracking all of these, instead of  holding community managers to a specific purpose, because there are many factors outside of their control that could affect results.

• Volume of content output: Number of posts, number of @replies sent, % of fan comments responded to, etc.
• Speed of replies
• Spam removed
• Escalation paths followed properly
• Content that meets our «Perfect Post Checklist» – these differ by channel, but here are some of the items included on our perfect post checklists:

• Posted at the appropriate time/day
• Clear CTA
• Matches brand voice
• Relevant to the community
• Proper tags, mentions, or backlinks
• Proper spelling and grammar
• Links are properly tracked and work
• Blog-specific: All content and images are sourced properly; post is tagged and categorized; post slug is correct; post-previewed and formatted correctly