AUTHOR NOTE

This was originally posted on my WordPress blog, which I have deleted after migrating the blog's posts to this website in November 2025. Differences from the original are minimal and include: grammatical corrections throughout the post, adding in paragraph breaks to remove the wall of text, rearranging the sentences around the metrics I was held to at XCS, removing seemingly weird emojis, hyperlinking to sections for easier navigation within the post, clarifying how watching viewers drop off increases completion rate, and there are a couple Author's Notes added to provide some context.

“Hey, can we track our community engagement efforts with the engagement rate of the social content we publish?” Ugh.

Yes, but also no. 🙄

The biggest problem I see right now with companies who say they listen to their customers is that most of them still sit community management under traditional marketing and undervalue its existence. We have built this thought in the tech industry that managing a community is just marketing for reach and getting more followers, but it’s truly so much more than that, and it’s incredibly hard to measure because people in charge do not understand its impact without “hard data”.

Because feelings and real conversations aren’t valid, obviously.

I’ve been finding more and more product marketing managers understand that brand loyalty is important, but they still sit on more traditional marketing teams and beholden to archaic fluff numbers. In fact, the DevRel world has it right where your north star when building a community should be monthly active users, and everything you do falls into how that number is affected.

I’ve had to deal with metrics in most of my roles, the most notable are ridiculous call center KPIs. Setting a goal of completing a support call within 10 minutes (if you’re lucky) is absolute ass, with nearly no room to do wrap up notes aftercall and often getting a floor supe coming around past 12 minutes with a board that says “You’re over time!” These are metrics that you are keeping for someone you never interact with, it’s a really disjointed relationship between support and those who make decisions.

We had metrics when I worked on the Xbox Support forums reviewing around 400+ posts a week using an extension in Chrome to track our work. We, uh, weren’t really held to them. 😆 We instead focused heavily on quality over quantity, holding ourselves above the standard type of support by providing each other meaningful coachings on opportunities for improvement. It was this experience and kind of “metric” that I set up for myself and my direct reports on the Edge team; we also used CSAT since our goal was also making sure people were happy.

I am intimately aware of social media metrics and here to tell you: most of them are purely vanity numbers. They have no real value other than what kind of content performs better than others; you can get ratioed and still think you performed well because the replies help increase engagement rate, positive or negative. The context is missing in that data, and it’s the most important aspect of it. My opinion is that companies need someone who can analyze this data as a whole to create a story from it and explain the impact it could have on a brand - for better or for worse.

Hootsuite posted an article about the key things you need track for social media metrics and what bothers me is that they not only numbered the list labeled as “the most important metrics”, they put sentiment and share of voice as the last two despite having CSAT and NPS higher on the list. Numbering a list instead of using bullet points gives a false sense of ranking, so this looks like they are devaluing these two items that provides so much context for the rest of the numbers.

That rubs me the wrong way, so I decided to go through the list and explain whether I feel a metric is a vanity number or if it is truly valuable - but in a ranking that makes more sense to me for a role focusing on community building and brand loyalty.

social share of voice (SSoV)

Your share of voice is how many people are talking about your brand compared to your competitors, and it’s one of the most important things to pay attention to when building a community. You want to know what they think of your competition and how often they are talking about both of you. You can listen to both direct (with the brand) and indirect (without the brand) conversations, I find combining both helps out the most. A lot of tools don’t do this well yet, but with better AI coming into the tech world and the current open source solutions, it’s only a matter of time before this is easier to do.

~ How I use this: When investigating a community to find strengths and weaknesses; health of community reporting; competitive research for product insights.
~ Where I won’t use this: I love this metric in community building and brand recognition, I’ll use it wherever I can!

social sentiment

Aha, my expertise - how happy or meh your users are about you on social media. Hootsuite says you need help calculating this with tools to which I say, BAH. Supporting a brand that is a common word (edge) was not something that even tools could help with without a ton of hand holding, so I manually adjusted sentiment on a weekly basis. To my credit, I have boosted processing thanks to my flavor of autism and can analyze context faster than most others. I look forward to the ML improvements in the near future with the wider adoption of conversational AIs like new Bing and Bard, because this whole process was something I fought to improve within Microsoft for several years (Sprinklr sucks at contextualizing sentiment to a product with a common word). If you just read verbatims from a sample of mentions, the tool you use is your brain’s ability to see context.

AUTHOR'S NOTE, Nov 2025

lmaoooooo jesus fuck i pretended to be hopeful about generative AI??? what the fuck missy lol

~ How I use this: In every aspect of what I do - sentiment is often an afterthought, I make it the forefront.
~ When I won’t use this: This metric can show how happy people are with your product, your communications, your changes, your content, everything - use it.

audience growth rate

What you can also think of as follower growth rate, this shows how quickly your community is building or failing. This is one of the more important metrics to keep track of as it shows the health of your community at a macro level. When you first start a community, your growth rate is going to be incredibly high due to a small community and taper off as your community gets bigger. It’s important to remember that as you build up your goals for your new community or are taking one over that already has a following.

~ How I use this: With managers or leadership for how well the community is maintained; as a supplement to Sentiment and CSAT in health of community reporting.
~ Where I won’t use this: With feature owners on communications we collaborated on - they don’t need the stress of if they impacted our community’s health, it’s ultimately my responsibility.

customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

This one I use often because a lot of community building is making sure they are happy (and the way I build communities is being part support). It’s hard to collect, though - most people you help won’t provide this data so it’s not a full picture and it’s an overused form of surveying users who are done with seeing it. I’ve built CSAT surveys for individual employees and program-wide to gather this data; as long as you have an open text box that allows them to give context for their selection you can get some great insights from this. It may be overused, but it’s also the most widely recognized.

~ How I use this: Health of community reporting; primary KPI for success of engagement; individual success.
~ Where I won’t use this: With feature owners and marketing partners - this is solely my responsibility and the metric doesn’t help either of these types of colleagues.

net promoter score (NPS)

NPS is that whole “how likely would you recommend” set of questions, and it’s widely used. The problem is that it’s not actually a good metric by itself and most of the questions asked are leading. I prefer using alternative questions like, “In the last x time frame, have you considered switching products to our competitor? [Yes/No]”, which can help identify loyalty better than, “Would you recommend my product?” Another way this can be asked to be specific to your community is, “Have you had a community interaction in the last x time frame that made you think of leaving the community? [Yes/No]”. Including an open text box will allow users to tell you exactly where things are going wrong for them. The 1-10 scale is incredibly archaic and I dislike using it, the explicit binary answer gives you a clear picture of your promoters and detractors.

~ How I use this: Health of community reporting; primary KPI for success of brand recognition; success of a community program overall.
~ Where I won’t use this: Individual success - while we build brand recognition, this metric is representative of the product or community overall and not an individual.

amplification rate

This is essentially how much your followers are sharing your content specifically. Not to be confused with engagement rate, it shows how your reach is increasing. This is better to track than engagement rate because in community building you are trying to increase brand recognition in which this can correlate. Additionally, those who are the largest contributors to this metric can be considered your superfans you pull in. The type of data you have access to for a social platform determines if you can track this easily or not, but I think Orbit.love is one of the best ways to track this - I wish I was able to implement their product for Edge.

AUTHOR'S NOTE, Nov 2025

orbit.love no longer seems to exist, which is pretty sad. It was acquired by Postman in April 2024, shortly after I started working for Nabu Casa, but now listed as part of JetRockets' portfolio. From what I can tell, this is just another open source victim of being gobbled up by the tech industry. 😔

~ How I use this: With feature owners whose content I am helping amplify; health of community reporting; in presentations about brand-damaging content.
~ Where I won’t use this: With leadership audiences regularly - in cases where brand damage occurs, they need to understand how fast it spread, though.

engagement Rate

As I explained at the beginning of the post, engagement rate is just how much people engage with your content. Likes, shares, and comments all contribute to this and weigh the same against the metric. It’s useless by itself but good to look at in combination with sentiment as you watch the health of your community, and there are way too many ways to calculate this. This is why I prefer amplification rate over than engagement rate.

~ How I use this: With marketing partners during major industry events; health of community reporting to the team.
~ Where I won’t use this: With leadership audiences - they don’t look at the bigger picture of this number and often ignore when negative context is included.

video views and video completion rate

I am combining these two as they need to be together if you are going to use them. These are useful if you are creating video content for your community like fireside chats with your colleagues or walkthroughs for how to use your product. Views are calculated differently on each platform, so using views and completion time together shows a good picture of how well the content landed with your community. It’s also a great indication of how long you should be making your videos - optimizing the length of your videos helps with increasing completion rate.

~ How I use this: With marketing partners and feature owners whose content I am helping amplify; when planning out a content calendar.
~ Where I won’t use this: Health of community reporting - this just shows how well your content performs at that time; at the leadership level, they should not care how well your video performed.

reach

This is an easy metric to track, it’s simply how many people see your content and every tool out there can help show you it these days. You can keep an eye on the percentage who are followers and non-followers, however this metric really just shows how well your content performs combined with the size of your active following. An example of why this is bad to focus on: If your content goes viral in a negative way, you’re still getting that reach.

~ How I use this: With feature owners whose content I am helping amplify; with marketing partners during major industry events.
~ Where I won’t use this: With leadership audiences - they typically don’t grasp how reach works, and the conversations about its value tend to be circular.

impressions

Another confusing metric, impressions are how many times someone saw your content. An easy example is blog views - you can see how many unique people have visited your site and how many views it has had in total, and views will nearly always be higher than visits (unless you somehow maintain a 1:1 ratio). This means people keep coming back to what you’re talking about, which can be great to track, but without any other context this number doesn’t do much.

~ How I use this: 🫣
~ Where I won’t use this: With anyone, I hate this metric.

virality rate

Now we’re just making up metrics, aren’t we? Gotta find something to justify your TikTok account? This is the number of shares (amplification) divided by the number of impressions. This is useless for community building and brand recognition - like reach, your virality rate means nothing without context.

~ How I use this: 🫣
~ Where I won’t use this: With anyone, this is a vanity metric.

return on investment metrics

Click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, cost-per-click (CPC), and cost per thousand impressions (CPM) are all almost exclusively social media metrics for paid content and what most leadership teams incorrectly consider community engagement metrics. I am against using these for community building because I think it’s gross justifying community content by how much it costs; content that is liked by the community but not “performing well” tends to be pushed aside for content that can prove it is earning the company money or returning value through these metrics. CTR can be used for organic (not paid) content to see how well you are encouraging people to go to the bigger picture and off the social platform you posted on, but that’s the extent of its usefulness - you can get that same traffic data from the website you are pointing to as the views and click sources.

~ How I use these: When pitching a new content series to be produced with marketing or teammates - I use them as goals based on historical ranges of the cost.
~ Where I won’t use these: Justifying 1:1 engagement with the community; health of community reporting - both of these should just roll into the salary of the employee as your ROI.

The way I manage communities has me focus on its audience growth (with higher goals earlier in a community, lowering as the community grows) and sentiment shifts (diving into what is driving negative or positive sentiment over a specified percentage of volume, including share of voice). Everything else rolls into improving these really well.

To show impact on the product as a feedback loop owner (as an engagement manager should be), I track the completion of feedback requests (including sentiment on the implementation of said feedback) and as much metadata about bugs escalated as possible (where it came from, link to other reports, the history of the item, and linking to bugs the engineers or feature owners own). I try to utilize CSAT and NPS as the bigger picture presented to leadership - a set of numbers that they can easily understand.

Overall, the article about Measuring DevRel linked at the beginning of this word vomit is great advice for building up any community, not only developer-focused ones, since it digs into the specialty of the relationship owner and how to effectively do and measure each specialty. They give a really good picture as to what works and what doesn’t when it comes to community building. The author doesn’t agree with my take on NPS, but they also call out using a different question than the generic one is better than nothing.

Some of my opinions here are hot takes and marketing partners I’ve told these to in the past were surprised at my opinion having been a long time community manager. Sure, you want to measure how well your content performs on social media, but ultimately how well your content performs doesn’t explain the macrosituation of your product - only how well your team can make high-performing social media content.

-🧜‍♀️🦄