Online Community Management For Dummies®

Chapter 12

Evaluating Community Participation

In This Chapter

• Analyzing the usefulness of feedback
• Understanding ROI
• Listening to people outside of your community

Community managers enjoy the social-networking and content-creation aspects of their jobs, but handling the nitty-gritty details usually isn't a favorite task. Who wants to talk about things like subscription numbers or community participation, and just how do you evaluate community management anyway?

In this chapter, I discuss some of the things that you need to track to determine whether your community is a success and you're achieving your goals as a community manager. The numbers stuff can be a little boring, but it can also be the most rewarding aspect of your job. After all, the boring stuff tells you how well you're doing.

Looking at the Bottom Line: Return on Investment

Every community has a purpose. If it fails to achieve its purpose, the community is unnecessary and a waste of manpower, resources, and money. Face it — if your community isn't bringing in results, there's really no sense in keeping it going.

As community manager, your job is to assess every promotion, event, activity, and bit of content to determine its success. How your community reacts to everything you do is an important indicator of success.

Return on investment (ROI) is exactly what it sounds like. If your community is achieving or even surpassing its goals, your ROI action is rocking and rolling. If you're losing money or campaigns aren't ...