What is normal activity for the community right after the launch? How many active users can you expect when you start your community journey? Who are those users that move forward and develop your community?
When you pay a huge effort to launch a perfect digital workplace, it is normal to expect 100% of users to be involved in community life. However, you might need to be ready to see from 10% to 30% of participants, and that is OK. A recently launched community is like a stranger that you may not want to deal with at first. Your goal is to transform this 10-30 % into 60-80%.
The core principle of a successful digital workplace is to choose, understand, and follow the main purpose of the community but this is too hard at the very beginning of community life. It takes time to understand what your users need. Analytics is the perfect tool to follow and even understand the purpose.
Chosen correctly, the metrics, along with the benchmarks selected for them, will help you to correctly track the required activity to achieve your purpose. In the process of analytics analysis, you will understand whether the chosen development vector is correct or not, and adjust it if necessary.
So what are the main metrics you will need to get the maximum information from your community?
To get the best from your digital workplace, you should also take into account its possibilities, what data it can provide, and how much money you’re ready to spend to get more flexible data.
An extra budget may give a lot more opportunities with the different types of additional analytics modules. More information on this topic you can find in our article about analytics decisions.
User adoption
User adoption is a very important metric for the community that is being launched. This metric counts the growth of the number of users in various directions.
- New community users.
- Users that are interested in the community.
- Readers.
- Influencers.
What indicators measure user adoption:
- the number of company employees;
- the number of the licenses your community has;
- the number of user accounts in the community;
- the number of users that logged in at least once;
- the number of users that logged in at least once for the past 30 / 7 days;
- the number of users that viewed more than one page for the chosen amount of time;
- the number of users that read / commented / liked / shared any piece of content for the chosen amount of time;
- the number of users that created the content for the chosen amount of time;
- MAU / DAU metrics.
You can call it a growth positive dynamics if for the first month you will get about 20% of users.
It is a good growth dynamics if for the first month you get about 20% of the aimed number of users. That is if among all users that you expect to engage at least 20% of this number will log in and view more than one page of your community.
Many conditions can modify the understanding of a good growth dynamic number. For example, if your community contains the group of related companies the expected number of users for the first month may be lower, for about 15%. Of course, you can get more, the reasonable expectations will make good results even better. Analyze all such aspects in your case, this will help to adjust your expectations, as well as the expectations of the entire launch team and CEO.
Here are some additional conditions that you should take into account while developing a user adoption plan:
- the number of companies within one community;
- digitalization level of the users;
- type of community: internal or external;
- number of expected users;
- availability of a professional team for launching and developing the community;
- the number of field staff or the users that haven’t constant access to the community;
- access to the community from mobile devices;
- etc.
Users activity
One more very important metric is the percent of the active users in the community, that is, the users that take an active part in community life.
A small percentage – 10% of active users is a normal number for new communities. This means that all these people are already interested in the community and they can define the future vector of the development.
What indicators measure user activity:
- the list of original content leaders (usually, these users are excluded from the total number of active users in order to see the real picture of interest in the community);
- the number of users that logged in for the last 30 / 7 days;
- the number of users that read / commented / liked / shared anything for the chosen period of time;
- the number of users that created come content for the chosen period of time;
- MAU / DAU metrics.
It is important to distinguish between users-readers and users-influencers. Readers are measured by the number of views, likes, and comments. Influencers are measured by the number of created content.
Groups activity
This metrics shows how actively users create new groups and how many of these groups stay active.
What indicators measure groups activity:
- the number of all groups in the community;
- the number of groups created for the chosen amount of time;
- the number of groups with any activity for the chosen amount of time;
- the number of users that created at least one group;
- the activity of the users in strategically important groups: views, likes, comments, sharings, content creation;
- the number of dead groups (the groups that haven’t any activity for the last 30 / 60 / 90 days);
- the list of the most popular groups by the views number.
The most optimal way is to choose the key groups that you will actively develop and track activity within these groups. Additionally, it is important to clean up the community and delete all dead groups at least once a year. This will have a positive effect on the user experience, search within community experience, pages loading speed, and the memory space.
The success rate of popular groups directly depends on the percentage of active users in the community.
There is no unambiguous indicator of success in terms of the number of groups created since each company has its own minimum set of required groups. Another important indicator is the organization of business processes in the company: is there a project activity, does the company practices transferring people from different departments to the projects of their colleagues, and so on. It is important to take into account the possibility to create their own groups for every user or only admins can create groups.
Content creation
This metric helps to understand how to generate content and who can generate it.
What will you know as a result:
- which type of content is the most popular;
- what strategy you should choose to attract new users;
- what type of information should be in the news digests so they wouldn’t become spam;
- who are the content leaders in the community;
- how to grow new content leaders;
- how to get views and likes to strategic news.
What indicators measure content creation activity:
- the list of top-10 popular content items (by the number of views) for the chosen period of time;
- the list of the authors of the most popular content items;
- the list of the tags in the community + the most popular tags;
- the list of popular topics (you will have to select them manually by analyzing popular content items).
It is also important to analyze the activity of content leaders and / or TOP managers.
For example, some community managers use the measurement of the activity of content leaders and / or TOP managers every month according to the following indicators:
- total number of content items created;
- total number of views of the author’s content;
- total number of likes of the author’s content;
- total number of comments on the author’s content;
- author’s followers;
- author’s followings;
- total number of comments that the author created;
- total number of likes that the author has put;
- total number of the author mentions by other users.
Additional metrics for activity measurement
How popular key site pages are?
The number of active users on the selected page will show if the key pages/groups you selected are useful to users. These target locations include department home pages, job vacancies pages, corporate values pages.
How to measure: the number of followers, views, likes, and comments on pages, mentions of pages in users’ content.
Tags cloud
Track which tags are the most popular. How to use: create multiple tags related to generating users’ content. For example, #news, #values, #covid-19, #learning, #hobby.
Suggest users generate content using these tags. Thus, you will be able to track the most popular topics of discussions in the community.
Field staff activity
It is important to measure field staff activity (tech staff, call-centers workers, out of the office agents, etc.) in order to understand the ways to make access easier for them. If you see the interest among field staff you can pay additional attention to developing mobile solution so they could read all the important news wherever they are.
How to measure: create the list of employees separated by department and position, track the frequency of their visit to the community.
For this, the following indicators are suitable: the date of the last authorization (measure once a week and see who logs in more often than once a week); date of the first authorization; activity in the community; employee participation in project groups; employee geography; source of connection (desktop / mobile device).
Most of these metrics are good for both just launched and long-standing communities but it is okay if you will modify them for your goals. Use this list as a base to work with your analytics decision and build the advanced community development plan to make your users happy.
Cover photo – Adeolu Eletu
