Community Measurement – Influence
December 03 2009 by Jason Peck ~ 4 CommentsThis is Part 5 of a 9-part series on what to measure and how to determine ROI of your community website.
In the last article about community measurement, I covered member info – some items and metrics that you should be following to learn more about your members.
Today, I want to talk about a success indicator that is often overlooked. Influence.
To really guage the success of your online community website, you have to look outside it. It’s one thing if your members think it’s great and say so within the community. But if they really like it, they’ll be talking about it on other blogs, message boards and social networking sites.
When people say good things about your community, other people take note. They’ll hear about it, then stop by to see it for themselves. Then, they’ll (hopefully) tell their friends and the cycle continues. Over time, your community and your brand build credibility. Over time, this leads to influence, which means that people believe there is something valuable happening at your community.
Measuring Influence
Please see below for some things to measure and observe so you can get a feel for how influential your community is in the eyes of other people.
Number of links to the community – The number of links tells you how much authority/value people think your community has and this is one indicator of influence.
Mentions of the community on other sites – Set up some Google alerts and utilize some free tools such as Social Mention and Board Tracker so you can keep track of anytime people mention your community on other blogs, forums, and social networking websites. Keep track of everything in Excel. If you’re finding it hard to keep up with the number of mentions, check out a monitoring service such as Trackur or Radian6.
Are there times when people are linking to you more than others? Investigate and see if you can learn why. Then take this into consideration when developing content and features for your community members.
Mentions of your brand
Just as you’ve looked at mentions of your community on other websites, keep tabs on how many people are talking about your brand and what they’re saying. How has this changed since you started cultivating your community? If you’ve done things right, the level of conversation about your community and your brand should be higher, in most cases.
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What other things would you recommend keeping track of to determine the level of influence that your online community has? Remember that influence isn’t the end goal. Impact and results are. Stay tuned to learn about what else you should be measuring and how this helps you determine what your ROI is.
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