When I’m reviewing sites to make sure they are getting the most out of Vanilla, I’m always surprised to see some sites only have 1 reaction enabled – usually “Like” or “Upvote” – personally, I like a little variety beyond just these – I often share this screenshot of our user reactions – in this community, “Awesome” is almost always the top reaction in the community.
This is from the out of the box “Engagement” Dashboard of Analytics.
What do you use beyond "Like"? What's most popular?
Depending on the vibe of your community, this might be something like “Insightful” or “Care” – anyone else using interesting verbiage that makes sense for your community?
What useful data can we get out of reaction data?
Reviewing reaction data is a good way to see what kinds of content users are most interested in, as well as who is receiving those reactions to identify super users – but it’s also a cool way to review who’s giving reactions – these users might be folks that haven’t necessarily posted a lot but are engaged in community nonetheless.
Is there particular reaction data that you have found useful in your community?
Here are a few charts I find useful:
What kinds of reactions are being used?
The pie chart above is useful as a snapshot, but I like to go a little deeper and look over time:
I find that this is useful for determining what kinds of reactions are popular (and in my role, convincing folks to turn on more fun reactions…)
What posts are receiving a particular reaction?
This will allow you to figure out what kinds of posts are getting a certain kind of reaction (and hopefully add similar content to your content calendar to repeat that engagement)
What users are receiving the most reactions?
You could also filter this to a particular user like in the previous example, if you wanted to see what users were receiving the most 'awesomes' for example. As you might know, reactions are just one piece of the points puzzle, so you may want to look at this in tandem with overall points, answers/accepted answers and badges data. I find that while you'll likely see some familiar faces for these different charts, it can be interesting to see what users are getting points where so that you can consider those personas and figure out how to best engage them.
Who's giving reactions out?
This can help you identify users who are engaged and reacting to others' content
This can be a great way to find folks that might be 'lurkers' — the first page of our list is a lot of familiar faces, but you may be surprised to find an engaged user that's hitting those reaction buttons but not posting. I can think of a few different engagement activities that might be interesting next steps for this group, such as a 'generosity' badge for giving out great reactions, sending them a survey on what they want to see in the community, or doing a deep dive on that user and seeing what they've reacted to over time and ask them to create content around subject matter they seem interested in.
What ranks are reacting to content?
I often like to slice and dice different metrics by rank — here I've done it with staff filtered out:
This can be an interesting way to show the value of super users if you're trying to advocate for the creation of a super user program.
What metrics are you looking at?
What metrics are you looking at when it comes to reactions? Are there any charts around reactions that you are reviewing regularly? What do you use them for? I'd love to hear what you are looking at, what insights you've gleaned, and what actions you've taken based on this information.
