4 Reasons Why Community Analytics is Essential for Community Managers

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight” -Carly Fiorina

Online communities have empowered businesses to create a space for their users to engage in healthy conversations, resolve issues using user-generated content, and create strong brand advocates.

However, that’s not all that communities do. Rapid technological transformation and advancements have made it essential for businesses to adopt a data-driven approach and explore new opportunities in the community landscape.

Data analytics for communities is a powerful tool, using which community managers can analyze the effectiveness of community management strategies and explore valuable opportunities for business growth.
Let’s now understand why community analytics is vital for making informed decisions and how community managers can leverage the power of data to make their communities more dynamic.

What is Community Analytics?

Communities have become a vital channel for businesses to ace their marketing initiatives and achieve business objectives. Brands, today, are focusing their attention on building conversations around their products and services and keeping their users engaged. The more buzz you make about your products and services, the more it increases your chances to retain more users and generate brand loyalty.

Communities carry a lot of information about your users. If studied well, this information can unlock valuable insights into your customer’s preferences and interests. The data obtained can be used to make product improvements, market your services better, and strengthen your social presence.

With community analytics, you can also get a fair view of your customer’s pain points and other KPIs, which can be used to deliver diligent customer support, increasing CSAT.

4 Reasons Community Managers Should Use Community Analytics

Community management comprises various elements that help maintain the vibrancy of online communities and is inter-disciplinary as it involves skills like managing people virtually, assessing their emotional state, and developing strategies based on data and analytics.

Organizations, today, use data to make tactical decisions. Data analytics is a powerful tool that community managers can use to unlock the full potential of communities to drive business growth.

Here’s why community managers should use community analytics to drive more out of their online communities:

1. Reap Better Engagement: With data in your corner, you can assess which strategy is working for you and which is not. The best approach to this is to experiment with the strategy that you think best fits your organizational goals. You can first visualize what results you will get before starting an activity in the community and use data to analyze results.

2. Increase Community Reach: The growth of your online community depends on how engaging the experience is for your users. This is a major reason why community managers must use data to highlight what the customers want from your products and services and make it a more interactive experience for them. And not just the numbers, make sure you also pay attention to the context that’s driving those numbers. Your data will provide important insights about how many users followed you, unfollowed you, etc.

3. Prove Your ROI: Proving the ROI is one of the most important tasks that a community manager has to undertake. It is important to prove the ROI in order to sustain buy-ins, justify the resources used, and grow the initiative. Data helps prove ROI by giving clear insights into the retention rates, engagement metrics, and customer activity. With analytical data, you can showcase how well the community is performing in terms of customer engagement and reach and highlight the value that the community is adding to the organization.

4. Draw a Plan of Action: Community management involves brainstorming for new strategies and validating those strategies with data analytics to arrive at an affirmative decision. With data, community managers can attain achievable goals, craft a new plan of action, and measure performance.

Community analytics provides brands with a hawk-eye view of their user’s activities. Data-backed communities are a goldmine of information for brands to identify their customer’s interests, concerns, and if they are getting the right solutions through to them.

Community analytics give meaningful insights to businesses about how effective their strategies are and how well their community is performing and scale your business. It is the best way to make use of the available information to make customers successful and work towards achieving organizational goals.

Achieve unmatched levels of community engagement with the power of analytics. Let’s talk about how!