No two community members are the same.

You might have 100 Product Managers in your community, but do you know which of them is located in Austin so you can invite them to your in-person event? Or how about inactive Product Designers you want to re-engage with a fun challenge or competition that will tap into their creativity? Maybe you have some active Product Marketers you could ask contribute to a content series and potentially turn them into super users?

Even the most hands-on Community Managers will be hard pressed to remember every detail about all their members. It’s impossible!

With Community OS’s Segments tool, you have a multitude of ways to group your members so you can engage the right members in the the right way.

What is Community OS's Segments tool?

Our segments tool lets you easily categorize members based on the specific criteria you need to track. How long they’ve been a member, their activity level, role, location, company — they’re all on the table!

You can create two types of segments:

1. Smart segments: You set the parameters, and members are automatically added to the segment when they fulfill the criteria. When or if their status changes, they’ll be removed from the segment automatically too. Keep reading for examples!
2. Manual segments: You choose which specific members to add to the segment. They’ll remain in that segment until you remove them, and the segment won’t update until you manually add (or remove) members.

How does it help you?

• Segments make it easy to find the exact members you need in an instant, without combing through 100s or 1000s of records.
• It saves you time — you won’t need to manually create a filter each time you need information about a particular category of members. A segment is one click away, and a smart segment is always up to date!
• You can learn more about a member directly from their profile, where you’ll see all the segments a member is included in.

Where can I find it?

To set up a segment, log in to Community OS and click on Segments under the Community tab in the sidebar. Click on the button that says ‘+ New Segment’, select Manual or Smart, and start adding members or filters (depending on which segment type you choose). Any segments you create will be listed on this page, and you can edit or delete them from here as well.

Once you create a segment, you’ll be able to easily access it right above your community table when you log in to Community OS.

6 segment ideas to get you started

1. Members who work at a specific company

We already track all the companies present in your community, but with a ‘company’ segment, you’ll also be able to easily track which members belong to those companies. To do so, create a smart segment with the following filter:

Company Name is [insert company name]

2. Members who hold a specific role or title

To send event invitations or communications to members based on their role or job title, you can set up a smart segment to track when these roles change. To do so, create a smart segment with the following filter:

Job Role contains [insert role or title]

3. Members who are new to your community

Many CMs consider the first month the most important in a member’s community life cycle. Use Segments to build a custom onboarding program for your community! Track members who are brand new to your community, and reach out to them at certain benchmarks — like 7 days, and 30 days.

4. Most (or least) engaged members

With Community OS’s engagement scoring, we're already combining the actions of your members into one average engagement score (measuring frequency, recency, and the impact the actions have had within the community). You can use these to understand who your most active members are and, on the flip side, who your least active members are, to help prevent member churn. Use our Community Health scores, or the Last Seen feature, to pull these segments.

To create segments for your users based on engagement, create a smart segment for each and use the following filter options:

For your super users

Where Impact Score is greater than 2

(you can also add Recency Score and Frequency Score here if you'd like!)

For your active members

Where Frequency Score is greater than 1 AND Where Recency Score is greater than 1 AND Where Impact Score is greater than 1

For your inactive members

Where Recency Score is less than 1 AND Where Frequency Score is less than 1 AND Where Impact Score is less than 1

You can also set up a filter with the ‘Last Seen’ date to segment members who were last active in your community before the date or time period you specify.

5. Members in specific locations

Do you want to invite members to local events, or share city-specific (or country-specific) resources? You can easily segment members based on where they’re located. (If you use our signup form for your Slack community, don’t forget to collect this information!)

6. Members in a specific sub-group of your community

If your community has sub-groups — say, a mentorship program — you can manually create different segments to add your mentors and mentees to them. Add a segment name (2022 Q1 Mentees) and type in the member names or email addresses, then hit save!

You can use manual segments to track many different types of sub-groups:

a. AMA hosts

b. Community ambassador program members

c. Blog contributors

Remember to set a recurring monthly task to go in and add or remove members as needed to keep your manual segments updated!

👉 See how Commsor customer RevOps Co-op uses our Segments tool to organize members, facilitate events, and re-engage recently inactive users.

Not using Community OS yet? Book a demo.