Circle Community Analytics

Who Can You Invite (to your Party)?

We’ve been using Circle’s Analytics and learning unexpected benefits that we didn’t really plan on!

One of them is the popular posts–and who’s posting them. Here’s a story about how that happened for our group.

This stat is one of the most interesting I’ve found recently.

What’s going on here?

We landed a popular company to join our community and to be active. I’m pretty sure that company doesn’t really have its own forum or discussion group or maybe even Facebook Group so in our community is where you can get in touch with them.

Their simple post, “Hello from … ” was our most popular post over a recent period. Why? Because they are a popular company and in our community is the only way people can hear from them!

On that note, as I stated above, I don’t actually know where they are available outside of our group but even that is a telling statement! If I don’t know where else to hear from them and now I have a place to hear from them, I’ll come back to our community because I know they’re in here!

We wouldn’t have known about this had we not been able to easily access our analytics dashboard.

Action Item: invite new members to your community. Ideally, members that might have a bit of name recognition. Of course, this might seem easier than it is, but it doesn’t hurt to ask! We started inviting “famous” members to our community and as one came then came another to the point where we are slowly but surely becoming the place to be!

When Are We Getting New Members–and Why?

We still have a Facebook group but the goal of our key team is to bring everyone over to Circle.

With the analytics, it’s clear to see what actions are working–and which aren’t.

Just Ask

Although we

In fact, it’s easy to see, based on this chart of new members, when new (and especially “popular”) new members join our community.

Carrot

We use the “Carrot” method (or reward) for those who join our Circle group by showing what we have to offer–and how much better it is that that “other” community that shall not be named. 😉

We talk about how our engagement is higher, how we, the members of the team and the board of advisors, spend the bulk of our time here in Circle and less and less at that other place.

Or we can use the Stick method.

Stick

Whereas the Carrot is a reward or “good” things, the Stick method is “punishment” or simply “bad” things. We try not to bash the other community platforms but we do mention how easy to navigate Circle is and how there’s some gamification involved where you can rise up in the ranks the more active of a participant you are.

In the end, we prefer the Carrot method to showcase the good reasons to come over to Circle.

We are authors. We love to write. We love marketing and advertising … less.

However, based on our Circle analytics dashboard, we don’t have to rely on what we *think* might be the most popular posts or categories (or spaces), we can clearly see it.

We have also just recently implemented the new Circle feature of hashtags, so we’re looking forward to see what hashtags also bring the activity and what are most popular.

In our old community, we really had no idea what “spaces” were most popular. We just had to guess. Now we can clearly see which spaces (categories, groups, etc.) are the busiest and attract the most posts.

With Circle analytics, we can truly see what’s working, why it’s working, and where we can focus our efforts in the future to make a better community.

Yay!

What we’re most happy to see is an increase in our monthly active members.

With Circle analytics, we can see who is active and when and then the most important, why.

We’re learning which are our most popular categories and posts, and who are the most active members. In this way, we can reward those who are most active with prizes and other goodies.

We are experimenting with private spaces and also putting spaces behind pay Walls as courses and seeing how the traffic goes from the community into the courses and the private spaces.

Our community is thriving and we are providing more and more value because we can see better what’s going on and we can quickly improve things that need attention.

I have to say, as a bit of a tech geek, I really enjoyed the numbers and the graphs and the charts to show us what’s going on in our community.

One thing I would appreciate more would be even more game notification so that members could earn badges or stars or some kind of status to show off their activity in the group.

I often say that I’m not a very competitive person, but if there are stars involved or icons that I can earn badges, I’m as competitive as the next Member of any group!

We are really appreciating the circle and analytics as it’s making our community a better place for us to create content and to embrace our community and also for our community to get more value out of being here and it makes them wanna come back more often and engage on a deeper level.

I can’t wait to see what’s next with Circle and what they will offer up to make our community even stronger and so we can grow it even faster and with integrity.