When you’re hosting a community, tracking your engagement is key to making sure that your hard work is paying off, and that your community isn’t falling flat. But how do you know what exactly to track when you need to measure community engagement? Let’s find out.
Nas.io offers in-platform analytics tools to help you track your engagement easily and effectively. Read more here.
You might think community engagement is the basic liking, sharing, and commenting – but there’s actually much more to it than that. You can dive even deeper into monitoring your community analytics to get the most data possible, so you can create the best experience within your community.
Why should measure community engagement?
Tracking engagement analytics is important — not only to see the health of your business from a bird’s eye view and provide data proof if you need to provide it to an employer or collaborator — but it’s also key to inform your future decision-making and strategies.
The more data you have, the better your community is likely to become. After all, if you make decisions based on real proof from your own audience, you’ll be able to cater to the experience and shift your community to fit the needs of your specific members.
Monitoring your engagement helps you determine what people find interesting, what isn’t useful, or what topics resonate most with people. This way, you can do more of it to increase your overall engagement. Because when you increase engagement, you build deeper connections, and the overall experience is improved for everybody — after all, your members are a huge part of what creates the quality of a community.
10 ways to measure your community engagement
When it comes to measuring engagement in your community, deciding what exact metrics or numbers to track very much depends on what the ultimate goal is for your community. But for most community experiences, these are some of the most common, important metrics to start tracking if you want to make sure your community has good engagement:
1. Reactions to posts and discussions
One of the easiest and most effective ways of tracking overall engagement in your community is to look at the simple metrics you can often find on social media — such as likes, shares, and comments.
But while this is important to track because it gives you valuable information about your audience, it’s also important to look deeper at the level of interest or thought behind these engagements. Are people just hitting “share”? Are they typing their own response as they share your content? What are they commenting on? Are they commenting just emojis, or are they adding or contradicting your thoughts?
All of these things can help you determine not only the type of engagement you’re getting out of your community but also the quality of engagement that you’re getting and how interested they really are.
2. Bounce rates and general traffic
Wherever you might be hosting your community experience, make sure to take a look at bounce rates and the general traffic that your community platform is getting.
Traffic is simply the amount of people coming onto your site. Looking at these stats will also give you data surrounding where the majority of your audience is based, their age, general interests, and more that could help you cater the experience better to them in the future.
Bounce rates on the other hand will give you a good indication as to whether or not your site is inviting, easy to use, or well-thought-out enough to retain community members when they land on the first page. Bounce rates simply measure the amount of visitors who have come onto your site and left without searching any more pages. This can help give you an idea of where people are dropping off and failing to engage and connect with your community experience.
3. Measure community engagement through Chat activity
Not only do you want to see how much your members are engaging in discussions with you and discussion posts – but also note how much they are interacting with each other. Check out how much the chats are being used by members and how active they are in their own discussions.
On Nas.io, you can integrate a chat platform, like WhatsApp, to get more advanced analytics.
4. Curated discussions and content by the members
As a community manager, you might think that it’s your responsibility to run the show and the experience – and while fundamentally, this is true – the whole idea behind building a community is also encouraging members to engage with each other.
Start tracking and keeping an eye out for how much people are facilitating their own discussion, carrying out discussions of their own based on your initiated discussion, and how much they are sharing and supporting one another within the community.
This is the best sign of engagement that you can look for – people taking your ideas and building off of them to create something new. After all, that’s the true power of community. So, be sure to look at what people are doing on their own, what people are talking about, and how much they are engaging with each other and curating content as participants – not just engaging as followers.
If you see members sharing resources, creating resources, and facilitating interesting and relevant discussions within your community, then you can clearly tell that you’re building an active, engaged community.
5. Conversions
Conversions are how many people are converted into members or buyers of your product or service. By tracking conversions, you can see not only how good your marketing content is, and how clear you’re marketing your message — but it also shows how interested and engaged your members are in your mission as a whole.
This is especially true if, within your community, you sell a product or service and encourage your members to engage with it. If they do, it shows that people are actively engaged and interested in you, your story, and your mission and they are supporting you out of interest and loyalty, rather than being in your community out of necessity or convenience.
6. Reach
Reach demonstrates how many people your posts or content reach. Keep track of how many people see your content, how many people are viewing your posts, and what their responses are. If you share content or resources to support your members in their journey, see how many people it’s reaching compared to how many people are actually engaging with it.
7. Daily & monthly active users
Over time, it’s also good to keep track of how many people are using your platform on a daily and monthly basis. This will show you how many people are coming into your community and using it on the regular. If your numbers are slowly decreasing over time, this means that there’s not enough engaging content, discussions, or useful resources to keep people coming back for more.
8. Event attendance
Whenever you hold events or gatherings of any kind, pay attention to the signups and interest you get around the event. Take a look at how many people sign up, versus how many people actually end up attending.
Not only this, but you also want to pay attention to how engaged your audience is when they actually arrive at the event. Are they sitting back and not engaging in discussion? Are they chatting with each other, or building off the conversation after the event?
After you throw events like this to encourage engagement, don’t be afraid to ask for feedback to see how engaged they really felt. This is done efficiently through the:
9. Measure community engagement through surveys
The best way to really see how engaged people are within your community, and how your community experience is going is simple: ask.
Just because people might be showing up and “engaging” with the community experience, it doesn’t mean they are actually enjoying it. It doesn’t mean they’re hooked, or loyal, or that they wouldn’t just dip and find something else if a better experience came along.
Hold regular surveys whether it be after events, every month — or whatever works for you. This will help you get the most accurate and up-to-date information on how engaging your community really is.
10. Keep a monthly or bi-monthly log
Tracking engagement consistently is what will truly help you make the biggest impact with the information that you gather. Build a system whether it be a monthly, bi-monthly, or weekly analysis where you track engagement in a spreadsheet, analyze it, and find out a way to implement changes according to the data that you collect.
Start tracking your engagement with Nas.io
A huge part of being able to track your community engagement is through using the right analytics tools to help you get all the information you need. That’s why investing in a community-focused platform like Nas.io is key.
Nas.io is a forward-thinking platform that is directly committed to building functional, collaborative communities online for your brand. This is the platform that can truly help you measure community engagement better.
Our community-building tools are built by community experts and will help you build a top community experience from the ground up using analytics tools, customized experiences, excellent customer support, and more.
Read more and get started today at Nas.io
