A few weeks ago, I wrote a post on how Community is the Key to evaluating the success of social media engagement. As I confessed at the time, the idea was not fully formed and there was a long road ahead in thinking through the details and trying to transform the concept into something more tangible (and hopefully useful). 

I have continued to reflect on this and, for now, I am trying to work through how this might be examined for Facebook. That being said, I do hope to look at other platforms soon and also want to pull back a bit and think about community evaluation from a more macro level - i.e a comparative look at the strengths of different platforms and how they the mix of platforms can also build community.

I have 12,632 fans, how about you?
Even though Facebook's "walled garden" presents some challenges from a measurement perspective, there is some reasonably good information available. Facebook insights (for page owners) has some good base data and graphs while also allowing for the export of raw data to a CSV/ Excel file. However, for the most part, these statistics don't really get to my stated goal of how to measure (and build) community. Far too often raw fan counts are used as the sole metric to judge performance when this does not really paint a complete picture. Perhaps the best out-of-the-box metric that Facebook provides is their Post Quality metric which "...is determined by the percentage of your fans that engage when you post content to your Page." I worry though about relying on a metric whose algorithm is not entirely transparent and which could be altered (or removed) at any time.

What I care about
So here are three metrics that I care about and which I am testing out a method to measure community. 

• Community Growth | % change in community size (week/ week changes in the # of fans). Why it's valuable: For me, a healthy community will continue to grow at a good, steady pace. If the rate of change flattens out, it's time to investigate.
  
• Community Building | # of positive or neutral interactions (comments & all likes) / total number of interactions. Why it's valuable: Comments can be a real mixed bag and I think everyone has seen cases where comments devolve into unproductive rants or off-topic posts. Keeping an eye on the positive participation of the community is essential.
• Community Participation | Total # of interactions / total # of fans. Why it's valuable:  Generally, overall participation is fairly low percentage but this is a key metric to target. More participation will have impacts on overall post views, clickthroughs and the connection to the networks of more individuals.
  

The above list is short and pretty easy to handle on a weekly basis (which is key). However, it is missing some elements that I consider important and that I do want to monitor . For example, I am still trying to find a good way to capture participation diversity in way that does not take an inordinate amount of time or effort. I wholeheartedly believe that diversity is key to a healthy community but I can't quite accomplish what I want in an efficient enough manner (love to have some ideas on this one).

What I might not care about
I would close by saying that there are some standard metrics that I am NOT currently tracking (closely) and whose omission may raise some eyebrows. For now, I am not particularly concerned about clickthroughs or Website referrals. I would like to take the opportunity to test the theory but I feel pretty confident that building (and measuring) a healthy, vibrant and participative community will naturally have a positive impact on the aforementioned metrics. And given limited time and resources, I'd rather monitor the health of the patient than focus on the symptoms.

Disagree, have another idea? Post a comment.