How a community manager can measure the quality of a communication post?
Usually community managers help product teams to talk to the community about new upcoming features, solicit feedback about new ideas, etc. To track how your communication goes you might want to track:
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Average interest. The number of actions taken by all users in an announcement threat.
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Average reach. The number of unique users who viewed the post or the number of page views if it is impossible to count the number of unique users.
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Announcement checklist score. You might want to evaluate your announcement before posting it against the list of best practices of product announcements. Here are the questions:
- Does the post contain a story?
- Does the post contain a theme? Is there just one theme?
- Is the post shorter than 1.5 pages?
- Is the post written from a positive perspective (i.e. no blame to any group of our users)?
- Is the post written from a user-centric perspective?
- Does the post have a clear question or call to action for the community?
- Is the post easy to read and understand?
Sum up the number of “Yes” answers to determine whether you should post the announcement or it needs more work:
- 6–7 means you have a green light to post the announcement.
- 4–5 means that your post probably can/should be improved.
- 3 or below means that you should not post your announcement in its current form.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.