Your online community is where your members come together to learn, share, and network. That’s why it’s a rich source of insights into your members. And, that’s where metrics come in.
Let’s take a step back before we move on: Defining goals and success metrics are important first steps to getting started with your online member community.
Defining goals
If you haven’t already done so, be sure to define your organization’s goals for your online community. These might include:
- Growing the online community
- Recruiting more members
- Improving member engagement
- Improving member value
Next, establish a set of metrics to determine how well you’re tracking toward your goals and what opportunities you have for improvement. For example, for the goals mentioned above, consider the following metrics.
GOAL: Growing the online community
Metrics to track
- Number of active online community members
- Number of online community logins
Why track them?
These metrics tells you how many of your members have joined the online community and how many are using it. If the numbers are trending downward, you might want to:
- Promote the advantages of the online community more to members to get more of them to participate. You might even consider getting testimonials from your most engaged online community members to encourage other members to join in.
- Send notifications to online community members that include a digest of new posts, comments on discussions, or suggested new topics.
- Deliver personalized content to your members through feeds that serve content based on members’ interests and activities.
GOAL: Improving member engagement
Metrics to track
- Number of discussion posts and responses
- Number of page views
- Number of file uploads
- Most active members
Why track them?
These metrics can give you great insights into member engagement levels. To improve member engagement, you can do things like:
- Create groups for people with similar interests or attributes to network and discuss topics.
- Make participation easier by enabling your members to access your online community through a customized mobile app.
- Reward your most active members for their participation by displaying a badge on their profiles.
GOAL: Improving member value
Metrics to track
- Most active groups
- Most popular discussions
- Most frequently viewed pages
Why track them?
These metrics allow you to “hear” what members are saying about their interests. You can use these insights to adjust benefits and services – or even create new ones. This approach shows your members you’re listening by providing more of the content and resources they want.
Learn more
Nimble Communities allows you to easily set up and host an online member community. It’s built on the Salesforce Community Cloud community platform and provides the capabilities you need to drive continuous member engagement, improve member loyalty, and ultimately grow revenue.
