Community Metrics: The 3 Key Indicators for Your Project’s Success

Imagine you’ve built an online Community, but you’re not sure if everything is running smoothly.

How can you tell if your users are satisfied? How do you know where to improve? What are the warning signs that signal it’s time to intervene and make your project more effective, unlocking its full potential?

In this article, you’ll discover the 3 fundamental metrics to measure your online Community’s success and improve it day by day.

Retention: The Key to a Healthy and Dynamic Online Community. Learn How to Calculate and Monitor It

Retention measures the percentage of users who return to your online Community within a given time frame.

It’s a crucial indicator of your Community’s health because it shows whether your project is truly valued by your audience or if members lack incentives to connect regularly.

Low retention, for example, could indicate that users don’t feel engaged enough to come back, which is a worrying sign of your Community’s "lack of vitality." This could compromise the experience of your most active members and reduce relational dynamics that foster new ideas and overall engagement.

Retention is a metric to monitor carefully and consistently. To do this, you need to know how to calculate it.

First, pick a specific period for the retention measurement, for example, May 1, 2022, to June 30, 2022.

Then use this formula:
100 x (active users - new users) / users registered before the time period.

"Active users" means those who logged in at least once during the period. From these, subtract the new users registered during the period because they don’t count for retention.

For example: Suppose you had 390 users registered before May 1, 2022. During the period, you had 240 active users and 20 new registrations.

The formula is:
100 x (240 - 20) / 390 = 56.41

This means 56.41% of users registered before May 1, 2022, continued to access your Community during the selected period.

Engagement as a Fundamental Metric for Growing Your Online Community

Ensuring users log in regularly is important, but what do they do once they’re connected? Are they passive viewers or active contributors?

This is where the engagement rate helps us understand how many users are creating value by posting comments or full posts.

Retention alone isn’t enough to assess your Community’s health. You might have many daily logins, but if users don’t take action, you’re missing a huge opportunity for growth.

A high engagement rate strengthens the bond between your brand and Community members, encouraging dialogue that provides valuable insights to optimize your business strategy.

Here’s how to calculate it:

100 x active contributors / active users

Using the previous data:
Active users = 240
Active contributors (posted or commented) = 74

Calculation:
100 x 74 / 240 = 30.83

So, 30.83% of active users are actually creating value with their contributions.

The Benefits of Social Density in Growing and Adding Value to Your Online Community

The third key metric: social density.

You might have never heard of this. It’s less talked about than retention and engagement but is very important.

Social density measures the percentage of actual connections formed between users compared to the total possible connections.

In simple terms: if every member connected to every other member, you’d have the maximum possible connections. In reality, total connections are always fewer.

The higher the social density, the stronger your Community — it means users interact more and cultivate a group spirit that builds a strong identity around your brand.

How to calculate it:

First, find the maximum possible connections:
[active users x (active users - 1)] / 2

With 240 active users:
[240 x 239] / 2 = 28,680 possible connections

Suppose actual connections are 345:
Social density = 100 x 345 / 28,680 = 1.20

This means users formed 1.20% of all possible connections.

In Conclusion

Monitoring these 3 key Community metrics (retention, engagement, social density) should be part of your ongoing strategy.

Knowing these values and how they change over time gives you crucial clues about your project’s performance and what to improve.

We understand it can be complicated to keep track of these metrics.

Many still host Communities on traditional social media, which provide very limited user data, preventing accurate analysis.

Even with full data access, analyzing it to get a clear view of retention, engagement, and social density is not easy.

But imagine having a platform that gives you complete user data access and features designed to automatically track and calculate these metrics. A tool that shows your Community’s daily health status.

Sounds amazing, right?

Well, it exists: SelfCommunity — our platform that lets you take full control of your Community and users.

If you want to learn more, we could keep discussing here, but we don’t want to overload your reading. Instead, try our tool for creating proprietary social networks yourself.

Request a demo and see what SelfCommunity can do for you.