How online communities can boost social media marketing
Building a branded healthy online community is one of the most powerful ways to elevate your social media marketing strategy. A vibrant, engaged community fosters trust, encourages authentic user-generated content, and turns customers into loyal advocates. In this blog post, we explore how community-led growth can increase brand visibility, improve customer retention, and fuel word-of-mouth marketing.
Learn how to cultivate genuine conversations, encourage peer support, and align your community with your brand’s mission, so your social media becomes more than just posts, but a thriving ecosystem.
Community Benchmarking
Forrester research have created a Community Benchmarking Diagnostic tool. It was launched in a paper called the “Community Benchmarking Metrics – What To Expect For The Health Of Your Community” by Melissa Parrish who is one of my favourite Forrester analysts, and an expert on how to start up and run social communities.
Community managers just might love this!
I like this tool, especially useful for community managers to find out how they are managing their communities, especially when they are starting up. I would have found this particularly useful for me last year when I had to lead the management of a new community for my employer.
I strongly believe that communities grow through phases. The model for community maturity that I always use is from Telligent, and is called the “Telligent maturity model for communities and groups”. I knew we had reached the second stage when we started to get spammed on the weekends! This is just one of many signs that I believe signal when a community has become “Established”.
The community benchmarking diagnostic tool
The community benchmarking diagnostic tool first asks you to calculate the average number of community members that you can expect to join. Then the diagnostic tool can be used to see if you could expect below average, average, or above average results for the health of your community. It asks several questions, to which the response is yes or no, and here are just some of those questions:
- Do you have a definition for “active” member, and measuring against that definition?
- Do you have a promotional budget?
- Are you using social media and email to promote the community?
- Do you have a persistent link to the community in the main navigation of the website?
- Do you have at least 1 full-time resource dedicated to maintaining and managing the community?
- Do you have a set membership goals and are you measuring them?
Based on the results, it tells you if you are likely to fall short, meet, or outperform one or more of the average community health measures.
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