Last week, I wrote about four categories of brand community participants: the devotees, the tourists, the minglers, and the insiders. In Part 2 of this series, let me discuss how you can identify these different types of participants through their observable behavior in your community.
Image by Lieutenant Pol | CC 2.0
The Devotees:
The devotees are probably the most difficult to identify among the four categories, because these individuals are most likely lurkers that mostly keep it to themselves. But by combining community log data, it is still possible to recognizing such users. Signs of a devotees include:
- Moderate to frequent visit to the community.
- Rarely contributes to the conversation. If we were to calculate a ratio of posting to reading activities from the user’s activity log, the ratio should be quite low.
- For reading activities, the user reads mostly information/exchanges directly related to the brand. The average time spent on these brand-related messages is also disproportionately higher than non-brand-related messages.
- If a following or friending system exists in the community, a devotee is likely to have a small number of friends, and is likely to only follow well-respected members who know a lot about the brand.
The Tourists:
The most telltale sign of these users are their infrequent visits to the community. Other signs to look for:
- Very short membership history followed by inactivity or very sporadic usage.
- Average time spent on each message is short.
- No established friend or follower relationship within the community.
The Minglers:
Recall that these are social butterflies who are not that interested in the brand but very interested in social interactions. Their patterns of behavior will include:
- Moderate to high visit to the community.
- A large number of contributions, usually in response to other community members’ messages.
- Few and shallow reading activities characterized by relatively infrequent readings and small amount of time spent on each message.
- Reading activities do not exhibit a consistent relationship with the brand.
- Follow or befriend a large number of community participants, and usually are the ones who initiate such connections.
The Insiders:
These are true leaders of the community and tend to be highly visible. You can identify them by these traits:
- Frequent visit to the community.
- Activities consist of a large portion of reading as well as posting activities.
- Equally likely to initiate a conversation as to respond to others’ discussions.
- Due to their high visibility and central status, the messages insiders post are likely to be read widely and responded to frequently by other community participants.
- Show signs of ownership pride of the community, such as attempts to police the community, or commemoration of significant community events and dates.
- Have a large number of followers or friends, and equally likely to befriend others as being friended by others.
So putting all of the above together, here are a few metrics you should monitor to identify your community participant segments:
- Length of community membership;
- Frequency of log-in;
- Posting to reading activities ratio;
- Topic content of posting and reading activities;
- Ratio of conversation initiation to conversation response;
- Number of friends and followers;
- Direction of friendship (following vs. followed and friend vs. befriended).
By frequently examining these metrics, all of which can be fairly easily extracted from community records, you can quickly see the segments in your brand community as well as any shifts between segments that you should promote (e.g., from a mingler to an insider) or prevent (e.g., from a devotee to a tourist). These can also function as health barometers of your brand community. Of course, these simple metrics will not replace closer analysis of your community, but they can function as quick pulses that give early warning signals or gauge positive responses.
Now that you can find who belong to each of the four segments in your brand community, the next step is to design the appropriate target strategy for each segment. I will go over this in the third and last part of this series next week. So stay tuned…
If you have any thoughts about this, I would love to hear from you. Please feel free to leave a comment below.