AjayJunkies
Well-known member
Okay, so this is a post for all of the community nerds 
. If you're not a community nerd, you're still allowed to hang out with the cool kids 
The basic premise of this topic is: given the size of my community (as measured by the average active number of users who visit each day), is there an optimal number of new threads?
For context, my XF community has about 35 - 40 active users per day.
For example, you make 1 new thread. You're going to get some new discussions. You make 10 new threads, you'll obviously get more. But what if you make so many new threads to the point where the community becomes less and less enthusiastic about new discussions? Is there a sweet spot of new threads hat lead to the optimum number of discussions?
Here are real engagement numbers from Admin-Junkies.com:
These are blended averages on a daily basis over a two week period in May. All data from Xenforo's Statistics.
To summarize:
There are two different sweet spots that a community could aim for:
Assumptions & Thoughts
This is obviously a theoretical exercise, but one that's interesting and semi-useful. I do believe that a certain size of community can handle a certain bandwidth of discussions. Too few threads, and people don't have enough new things to talk about. Too many, and people get overwhelmed. It's less important to determine the exact number of new threads (aka we must aim for exactly 7.28 new threads a day!!) and more of an approximate range.
For those of you who took high school calculus or economics, this is simply a measurement to maximize the marginal posts / threads.
One of the big misassumptions, and one that I readily admit to, is that new posts are only attributed to new threads. That's obviously not true. People post on things posted the day before, the day before that, and ten years ago (hello bumping!). But what my community data showed me is that new threads have an "aura effect": whether or not users replied to new threads in that same day doesn't matter. More new threads lead to more new posts overall for the community.
The days where our community only posted 1 new thread didn't mean that all 35 posts occurred on that one new thread. If anything, 35 new posts might simply be the natural 'floor' of engagement for our community. If we posted nothing, our community might naturally generate about 3 dozen new posts. What is clear, however, is that our community does absolutely engage and discuss more - a lot more! - as we post more threads.
This also assumes all threads are the same, and we all know that's not really true in the real-world. Asking what users did on the weekend versus a technical discussion on community metrics vs a staff announcement should all have wildly different expectations on user engagement. This was broad strokes.
On a final note, I'm happy to call my fellow community junkies to dissect, investigate, and nerd out with me.
. If you're not a community nerd, you're still allowed to hang out with the cool kids The basic premise of this topic is: given the size of my community (as measured by the average active number of users who visit each day), is there an optimal number of new threads?
For context, my XF community has about 35 - 40 active users per day.
For example, you make 1 new thread. You're going to get some new discussions. You make 10 new threads, you'll obviously get more. But what if you make so many new threads to the point where the community becomes less and less enthusiastic about new discussions? Is there a sweet spot of new threads hat lead to the optimum number of discussions?
Here are real engagement numbers from Admin-Junkies.com:
| New Threads | Threads / Post Ratio | Total Posts |
1 | 35 | 35 |
7 | 7 | 49 |
15 | 5 | 75 |
To summarize:
- When our community only had 1 new thread, the thread / post ratio was the highest. Superficially, it looks like we got a ton of engagement on that 1 new thread. So you would think that we should stick to only 1 new thread per day, right?
- Well, not quite. As we increased the number of new threads, the total absolute number of posts increased. For example, we got ~49 posts on days when we had 7 threads and ~75 posts on days when we had 15 posts. But if you notice, the thread / post ratio is going down. Adding more posts didn't add the same proportional number of new posts.
- There could be a point, and empirically we haven't tested that limit yet, where we make so many new threads that the community starts to marginally not contribute any more new posts.
There are two different sweet spots that a community could aim for:
- You focus on the greatest posts / thread ratio, which means the most engagement per thread. In the real world, this means lively discussion per thread.
- You focus on the greatest posts overall, which means the most engagement. In the real world, this means pushing for the greatest number of overall posts.
Assumptions & Thoughts
This is obviously a theoretical exercise, but one that's interesting and semi-useful. I do believe that a certain size of community can handle a certain bandwidth of discussions. Too few threads, and people don't have enough new things to talk about. Too many, and people get overwhelmed. It's less important to determine the exact number of new threads (aka we must aim for exactly 7.28 new threads a day!!) and more of an approximate range.
For those of you who took high school calculus or economics, this is simply a measurement to maximize the marginal posts / threads.
One of the big misassumptions, and one that I readily admit to, is that new posts are only attributed to new threads. That's obviously not true. People post on things posted the day before, the day before that, and ten years ago (hello bumping!). But what my community data showed me is that new threads have an "aura effect": whether or not users replied to new threads in that same day doesn't matter. More new threads lead to more new posts overall for the community.
The days where our community only posted 1 new thread didn't mean that all 35 posts occurred on that one new thread. If anything, 35 new posts might simply be the natural 'floor' of engagement for our community. If we posted nothing, our community might naturally generate about 3 dozen new posts. What is clear, however, is that our community does absolutely engage and discuss more - a lot more! - as we post more threads.
This also assumes all threads are the same, and we all know that's not really true in the real-world. Asking what users did on the weekend versus a technical discussion on community metrics vs a staff announcement should all have wildly different expectations on user engagement. This was broad strokes.
On a final note, I'm happy to call my fellow community junkies to dissect, investigate, and nerd out with me.
