Tracking Whether Facebook Groups Feel More Like Communities

You are a product manager on Facebook Groups, and Meta wants members to feel a stronger sense of community in the groups they belong to. Which metrics would tell you whether that sense of community is actually improving? Explain what "sense of community" means in behavior you can observe, propose the metrics, and say which one you would treat as primary and what would keep it honest. ```hint Turn the feeling into behavior Picture two groups of the same size: in one, members feel they belong; in the other, they mostly scroll past posts. List what members of the first group do that members of the second do not. Each difference is a candidate signal. ``` ### Clarifying Questions - Which groups are in scope: large public interest groups, private groups of people who know each other offline, buy-and-sell groups, or all of them? - Are these metrics for judging specific Groups changes in experiments, for monitoring the health of Groups over time, or both? - Should the metrics center on ordinary members, on group admins and moderators, or on both? - Can in-product surveys sit alongside logged activity, or must the answer rely on behavioral data alone? ### What a Strong Answer Covers - An observable definition of "sense of community" broken into a few components, linked to why it matters to members and to Meta - Candidate metrics traced back to those components, each judged on how directly it reflects community as opposed to activity in general - One primary metric with a precise definition (unit, time window, normalization) and the reason it beats the alternatives - Guardrails, each tied to a specific way the primary metric could rise while members' experience of their groups gets worse - How improvement is compared fairly across dissimilar groups, how a change's effect is attributed when members influence one another, and how the behavioral proxies are validated ### Follow-up Questions - Posts per member rose after a change, but the share of posts that get any reply from another member fell. How do you read that, and what would you check next? - A feature applies to whole groups, and members influence one another. How would you design the experiment, and what does that design cost you in statistical power? - How would your primary metric and its targets differ for a very large public hobby group versus a small private group of neighbors?