Community Management and Community Activity

This data was originally featured in the August 31, 2022 newsletter found here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/blog/2022/08/inbox-insights-august-31-2022-community-management-members-only-social-media/

In this week’s Data Diaries, let’s expand on what Katie talked about with community management and community activity. When it comes to any kind of community, one of the things you want to know is how you’re doing. For Analytics for Marketers, since we own the Slack channel, we can export the raw data for any public channel (we cannot export anyone’s private messages, which is a good thing!) for further analysis.

Let’s first take a look at something easy and obvious: community activity. How active is the community? One of the advantages of exporting data is you can do some filtering on it – for an activity report, you’ll want to filter yourself out. After all, if you’re doing all the talking and no one else is, your community isn’t really thriving.

Excluding ourselves, this is what the last 4 years of our Slack community has looked like. Note the BIG change in volume in the last 4 months? We changed some tactics about how we manage our community to very good effect.

Next, let’s see what people are talking about:

Again, excluding ourselves, we see that marketing analytics is the biggest topic, followed by Google Analytics, Google Data Studio, and social media. These are the things people are discussing in aggregate. Doing pulse checks like this helps ensure that you’re stimulating discussions on the topics your community cares about the most.

Finally, what about the people themselves?

For privacy reasons, we’ve obscured the different participants. However, what we clearly see – because we’ve excluded ourselves – is that there are a couple of people who are HUGE participants, and then the rest of the population in our community. What would you do with information like this? If you’re thinking about asking volunteers to help moderate or be community ambassadors, your list of top users is a great place to start. People who are already invested in your community are more likely to want to help make it grow.

Private social media communities you own aren’t without analytics, and with their required data exports for compliance, you can take your data and thoroughly understand your community.