Blaise Grimes-Viort, Chief Services Officer at Emoderation, came up with the equation below to calculate the required resources to optimally support a social channel, including a community. It is based on the type of task and its corresponding duration. Tasks can include reading posts, creating replies, writing topics etc. Once they have been defined, the administration time associated with performing the defined tasks is added. These can include internal meetings, the logging of work hours, escalations, requesting updates from other departments etc. The result of this calculation is then multiplied by the number of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc. By dividing the total by the average hours per staff you get the FTE needed.
Do I have the right amount of staff?
The formula is as follows:
As this formula applies to multiple platforms, it can be simplified to focus solely on the capacity needed for one community. Also, benchmarks must be determined for the average number of tasks to be managed by the community, their duration and administrative load.
To simplify even further we define a task as an incoming post in a community which enables us to calculate the number of user generated posts one FTE can handle per month.
A quick rule of thumb
The simplest way to determine the number of FTEs needed is by dividing the number of comments created by what, on average, a moderator can handle per month which is 1085. At the end of the document we have included other factors to keep in mind.
It’s important to also take into account the number of incoming topics, since most of the time each topic contains a specific question or discussion. The higher the number of comments per topic, the more time is needed for a moderator to respond to them. On average a moderator can process 242 topics per FTE. The benchmark created on the handling of incoming topics can be found in Appendix 1.
Moderation resources at community launch
During the construction phase moderators must play a more active role in creating content. As a rule of thumb we recommend that at least 3 topics should be created per week, per category. This should not take longer than 20 minutes as a topic in a community does not have to be as polished as on other channels. The key is that new content is created regularly. The possibilities range from repurposing existing FAQs, using previous customer feedback and creating engaging content.
To gauge whether the number of moderator posts is the best metric to determine the number of FTEs needed, we can refer to the benchmarks figures which show that, on average, 1 FTE creates 364 posts per month (see Appendix 2). To give an idea roughly 27% of all comments are created by moderators. With a target for the number of topics and an estimation of user generated posts, we can use the following calculation:
(number of topics to create within a month
x
20 minutes)
+
(number of expected user generated posts
x
12 minutes per post)
While these are factors that can increase or decrease the needed capacity, it is also worth noting that there is a tendency to move resources from the community to other social channels when there is a higher demand, for instance when there is a disturbance. During these disturbances it is recommended to not withdraw resources from the community as more people can be updated at once from it. Instead it is best to create updates on the community and redirect people from other sources to the community for the latest information. Doing so will avoid one-on-one communication and have the feedback stored in one place.
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