Community By The Numbers - Part 2 - Activity Ratios

In my last post I discussed the importance of ignoring the common total registered users statistic, and paying attention to a couple different active user stats. When evaluating the value of a community, it definitely doesn’t stop here. For me, I place extra value on site activity ratios.

Why Ratios?

Site activity ratios are statistics such as average posts per user, or average comments per user/post, etc. But why ratios? Just like total registered users, total numbers for different activity points on a site are useless. A site that has 10,000 posts in a given time frame with 20,000 users is a lot less active then a site with 5,000 posts in that same time frame, but only 1,000 users. The only way to fully understand the value of an individual user, and community as a whole, is to compare the total numbers to base line statistics such as active users, # of logins, etc.

Different Base Lines, Different Meanings

The base line that you use will give you insight into different areas. Using total number of users will give you an idea of how valuable every new member is to the community. Using number of logins will give an indication of how “sticky” the site is. Comparing one activity to another such as evaluating comments, with posts as your baseline (i.e. average # of comments per post) can help shape product decisions such as what features to push.

Yelp.com as an Example

Broad examples will be tough for this post considering every community has different types of user activity features. So to get more specific, I’ll use one of my favorite community sites, Yelp.

There are a ton of ways to interact on Yelp. Write reviews, give someone a compliment, send a message to another user, post a picture, post on the forum, claim a review as useful, funny, or cool. If I was Yelp, a few of the stats I would be looking at would be:

Average Reviews/user, Average Reviews/active user, Average Reviews/login

Average Compliments Sent/user, Average Compliments Sent/active user, Average Compliments/login

Feedback (useful, funny, or cool)/review

Forum Posts/user, Responses/Forum Post, Forum Posts/login

Friends/user, Friends/active user, Email Invites/Friends

And those are just a few to get you started.

Taking It One Step Further
Out of these statistics, I would then break them down by geography, age range, and sex. By doing this it allows you to find the sweet spot of the community, which can then direct product and marketing decisions.

The Most Important Part
Sure these numbers will be interesting and insightful just looking at them once in awhile, but the real value comes from continually tracking them on regular basis such as per day or week. Tracking over time uncovers unexpected fluctuations in activity levels. Comparing these fluctuations to the timing of changes in the product or marketing efforts is extremely important. For example, introducing a new way for the user to interact on the site could positively or negatively impact other user activities. Even something as small as a text change could cause a fluctuation.

[tags]Social Networking, Social Network, User Activity, Statistics, Evaluating a Social Network, Yelp, Brian Balfour[/tags]