Community Trust Score (CTS) is a metric that applies the Net Promoter Score (NPS) framework to audience interactions on social media. Each interaction (comment, reply, reaction) is scored on a scale of 1 to 10 based on its emotional quality, sentiment and engagement depth. The scores are then classified into three groups: promoters (9-10), passives (7-8) and detractors (1-6).
CTS provides a standardized way to measure community health and loyalty over time, using real interaction data rather than survey responses.
How It Works
Traditional NPS requires sending surveys and asking "how likely are you to recommend us?" CTS eliminates the survey step entirely. Instead of asking people how they feel, it analyzes what they actually express in their interactions.
Each interaction is scored by evaluating:
- Sentiment polarity: Is the interaction positive, neutral or negative?
- Emotional specificity: What specific emotion is expressed (admiration, frustration, nostalgia)?
- Engagement quality: Is this a substantive interaction or a surface-level reaction?
- Context: Does the interaction reflect brand loyalty, product feedback, community participation or complaint?
The 1-10 score aggregates these signals into a single, comparable metric.
Why It Matters
CTS transforms community management from intuition-based to data-driven. Instead of "our community feels healthy" based on anecdotal observation, teams can track a concrete score over time and identify:
- Whether the proportion of promoters is growing or shrinking
- Which content types generate the highest CTS
- Which audience segments contain the most promoters versus detractors
- How community trust shifts in response to events, campaigns or organizational decisions
When CTS is combined with audience profiling, organizations can identify not just how many promoters they have but who those promoters are, what they care about and what keeps them engaged.
Related Terms
- Sentiment Analysis — one input that contributes to CTS calculation
- Emotion AI — the technology that enables emotion-level scoring
- Fan Engagement — the broader relationship that CTS quantifies
- Emotional Depth — a complementary metric measuring engagement quality
See how Felton uses Emotion AI to calculate Community Trust Scores across audience interactions.