A community engagement map is a tool you may find useful for your business or your clients. It’s a way to evaluate and visualize the communities and other social media elements currently in place for a business. It allows you to assess the current channels customers and others in your ecosystem are using to talk about your business and products.

Step 1: Define your social media goals

Before you build your community engagement map, define your goals for using social media. Examples of goals include: getting customers to promote your products by talking about their benefits and use; lowering support costs by getting the community to provide support and information to one another; encouraging cross-buying by bringing buyers of different products into the same communities, and so on. Knowing your goals is important because it will help define the information you collect and evaluate as part of your map.

Step 2: List the social media elements to include

Before you can build the map, you need to figure out what you’re going to be mapping. List all the communities you currently “own” such as your Facebook fan page, your Twitter account, the company blog, etc. Remember to include any additional pages or elements on your website that play a critical role, such as extensive FAQs that customer use, forums on your site, and so on.

Also, make sure you include external sites where your customers are congregating and talking about your business or products. Even if you don’t “own” these communities, they’re important to include if they are a gathering place for your customers. Remember, too, that depending upon your social media goals, you may want to include communities and elements used by people in your ecosystem other than customers. For example, you might need to include communities where your distributors, partners, or critical third-parties congregate. If your customers are patients but your services are provided through doctors’ offices, then it’s important to include communities for the doctors in your network.

Step 3: Assess each community and element

For each social media element, you want to gather specific information. Some key information to gather:

• Number of community members
• Demographics of the community members (based on the segmentation that makes sense for your goals)
• Frequency of posts and whether they are primarily made by the community owner or members
• Frequency of comments or conversations around the posts
• The level of sharing outside of this community, such as retweeting.
• The level of cross-promotion (Twitter linking to Facebook, Facebook linking to the blog, etc.)
• The percentage of users in each community who are also part of another community or could be. (For example, if 20% of your Facebook users also use Twitter, you could be reaching that 20% through both channels.)

Depending upon your goals, you may want to gather other information. For example, if your goal is to get the community to provide support and information, what percentage of the posts community members make are of that nature? Based on your goals, decide what additional information you’ll need in order to evaluate each social media element’s current contribution to those goals.

Some social networks are easy to mine for this kind of information. You can find many free tools for Twitter, for instance. In other cases, you may need to dig deeper, conduct polls of users, and so on.

Step 4: Create the community engagement graph and map

Already, you probably know more about the social media landscape for your company than you did before. Now, you can create some graphics to help you grasp the situation better. For the first, use something like a bubble chart. On the x axis, chart engagement, as measured by frequency of posts by community members and the number of comments/ conversations around them. (Combine the two measures to get a single value.)

The y axis can be used to measure any number of factors, depending upon your goal. If your goal is product promotion, you might measure the percentage of positive posts about your product. If it’s to get good user-generated technical content, you might measure the quality and technical depth of the posts from each channel. Here’s an example of what your graph might look like:

Now, you’ve got a good picture of the communities that are best serving your goals, and where each lies. Note that you can create multiple bubble charts to evaluate different aspects of the communities, by changing what the y and even the x axis measure.

Another useful graphic to create is a kind of Venn diagram, showing the relationship between the communities. If you’ve been able to obtain information about the number of users who are in more than one community, overlap the circles representing the communities to indicate the percentage of overlap in users.

Now, add lines to each one, showing where significant cross-promotion is occurring. If your Twitter account frequently points to your blog, show a line in that direction. If the blog also includes a feed from the Twitter account, or a Follow button and not infrequent references to your Twitter account, include an arrow in the other direction as well. Soon, you’ll have a map showing your current cross-promotion and the possible touchpoints available for different percentages of users.

Conclusion

You can get even more complicated with these community engagement maps. And you may need to do so, if your ecosystem is complex (such as the patient-doctor scenario). Once you have a good picture, literally, of your community ecosystem, you can create similar diagrams to show how the community engagement maps would look if you reached your social media goals. Then, you’re ready to move to the next step: developing a strategy to help move your communities in that direction—always keeping in mind that you can only encourage these shifts, and need to be ready to accommodate the needs and desires that arise from the users themselves, and seize the opportunities that arise, as well.

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