User Types

Overview

Online social media communities are made up of participants who contribute in their own patterns and styles to create unique content and sharing opportunities which organically meet the needs of their population. This means that the right mix of participants is critical for maintaining a productive community. Telligent Analytics 3.0 helps you monitor and measure the dynamic composition of your community; keep the pulse of its changes, and trend its tendencies - thus enhancing its productivity for your group's unique needs.

Research has shown that online communities and other social media spaces are populated by a range of different kinds of participants who play different roles. The most successful communities attract and retain the right balance of participants, and this balance differs based upon the community type. Telligent Analytics 3.0 identifies - from research and customer experience - the seven user types who perform key roles in the community or social media space and who make critical contributions to its management and success. Analytics' reports reveal how many of which user types perform what roles in the community. The reports also provide trend analysis to help you maximize the intended effects of these participants, their roles, and their data.

Telligent Analytics 3.0 divides these user types into seven user categories. While other types of user behaviors do exist, these seven user types have been shown to encompass the bulk of community activity. They include:

Influencers
Askers
Answerers
Connectors
Originators
Commenters
Moderators

By measuring each participant’s behavior over time, Telligent Analytics calculates a score for a user which describes how much he/she demonstrates each of these behaviors. Each user-type measure - or metric - integrates elements from one or more of the user’s activities and networks created while participating as a member of the online community.

The seven user types are explained in the table below:

User Type Roles	Description
Influencer: User who is connected to other well-connected users	Influential user who is strategically located and connected in his/her network. Linked to by others, who are, themselves, very highly connected. In technical terms, this is a measure of a user's "eigenvector centrality," which measures how much the people you are connected to are connected to others.
Asker: User who raises questions which are answered by Answerer user roles	Plainly put, these people post questions to the community. They are people who mostly ask questions (forum posts marked as questions) and are answered by the experts in their communities.
Answerer: User who replies to many questions	Expert people who mostly reply to the questions asked by Askers.
Connector: Highly connected user who has replied or linked to many other users	People who are positioned at the "center" of their networks who have many links to others, and are often the conduit through whom messages between other people pass.
Originator: User who initiates new content in the site that is often linked to by others	People who start conversations, new documents, and blog posts more than they reply or respond to existing content. Originators often set the agenda for discussion within a community.
Commenter: User who replies or links to content created by others	Comments on content already created by other users.
Moderator: User who moderates content created by others	Uses the moderation features of the site to change or remove content or limit the privileges of other users.

Summary

By recognizing the diversity of participation in social media communities, Telligent Analytics 3.0 breaks down the uniform crowd in your community into the seven key user types. When community managers have this data available, they can see their communities change over time, identify key contributors, and guide their communities towards established goals.