If you’re trying to grow your business across social media channels, keeping tabs on your performance can be more than a little challenging.
Being able to collate accurate data points from your various social media campaigns, both for using as snapshots of campaign health and sharing with internal stakeholders, is a crucial part of any social media manager’s job description.
Using a social media dashboard is one of the most effective ways to simplify the mesh of data from your various channels and draw out clear, actionable insights.
In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at what social media dashboards are, what their key benefits are, and the best way to approach using a dashboard for your campaigns.
What is a Social Media Dashboard?
A social media dashboard is an analytics tool that brings together all the key metrics of your social media marketing campaigns and displays it in a single, intuitive space, allowing you to quickly assess the performance of your campaigns, brand sentiment, and relationship with your online community.
Though there’s a lot of variance in terms of social media dashboards’ layout and level of detail, some of the key metrics that are found in many social media dashboard setups include:
- Engagement metrics.
- Follower count and growth rate.
- Audience demographic information.
- Content performance.
These at-a-glance metrics can be exceptionally useful when you’re trying to review the impact of your social media strategy, and fine-tune your next steps to achieve stronger social KPIs.
4 Benefits of a Social Media Dashboard
Having a social media dashboard as part of your marketing tech stack can make a huge difference to your performance on social media channels, empowering your approach to analytics, your brand equity on social media, and various internal processes.
Here are some of the most significant benefits of using a social media dashboard for your campaigns:
Simplified Reporting
Perhaps the biggest advantage of using a social media dashboard is its ability to simplify complex, disparate datasets into more simple formats, making it easier to highlight trends in your data and share reports that are easy for stakeholders to understand.
Gaining a Competitive Edge
Many social media dashboards have features that are dedicated to competitive analysis and audience sentiment data, providing a clear and applicable understanding of how your brand is measuring up to other businesses in your industry niche. This kind of data will produce clear, actionable findings that will enable you to fine-tune a strategy aimed at out-performing your competition.
Effective Social Media Team Collaboration
Many popular social media dashboard designs have collaborative features, allowing you and other members of your social media team to access dashboards at the same time, annotate relevant views, and assign follow-ups on analysis. This will help you ensure that your entire social media planning is on the same page when it comes to assessing campaigns, while maintaining focus and avoiding the risk of miscommunication or mistakes.
Automated Alerts and Communication
Social media dashboards can also automate a number of routine tasks that you may have to make room for when taking a more manual, dated approach to social media analysis.
Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, social media dashboards can recognize significant changes in your social marketing metrics, such as sudden spikes or drops in audience sentiment, and then automatically send you alerts. This will help you respond to issues or seize on opportunities more efficiently.
Accessing Your Social Media Dashboard
When you’re looking to start using a social media dashboard for the first time, there are two main ways you can approach it: creating your own dashboard using a data management service, or using a pre-formatted dashboard from a social media analytics platform.
Creating a Custom Social Media Dashboard
Choosing the DIY route will give you greater customization, with the ability to tailor the platform metrics and views according to the unique needs and objectives of your business. A custom dashboard may also provide greater room for scalability, making it easier to revisit the design of your social media dashboard as your strategy develops, and then adapt it to your needs.
Though these benefits might be attractive if you have a very specific idea in mind for what you want your dashboard to look like, creating a custom dashboard can also be very time-intensive, especially when you’re first organizing your data and discussing options with the company you partner with to create the dashboard. There may also be an increased need to maintain your dashboard and train your team to oversee the data scraping functionality of a custom social media dashboard.
Using Pre-Built Social Media Dashboard Software
The other option for accessing a social media dashboard is to sign up for a social media analytics platform with an in-built dashboard feature.
The core benefit of this is the comparative ease of setting up and using the dashboard, as social media analytics is a competitive niche and most providers are highly motivated to give the end user an intuitive, hassle-free experience. This means you’ll not only be able to start using your dashboard straight away, but also save time and resources that might be spent on training and getting to grips with a custom solution.
On the other hand, the limited customization means that you may have to find compromises when collating your most important datasets, or deal with obstacles when trying to integrate your dashboard with third-party data sources.
If you’re looking to avoid the challenges that come with a custom dashboard and get an instant view of your social media performance, be sure to check out the intuitive and versatile Highperformr analytics platform.
5 Tips for Finding Your Ideal Social Media Dashboard
Like with any tool, there’s a lot of variance between different social media dashboards and how well each solution will suit your needs.
Here’s some tips to bear in mind when you’re looking for your ideal social media dashboard.
- Take some time to think about the specific goals you’re trying to achieve with your social media marketing strategy, and use these to prioritize dashboards that are well-suited to helping you achieve these goals.
- Once you’ve established your main objectives, list the essential metrics you’ll use to track your progress towards these objectives, for example click-through rate, follower growth rate, reach, and audience sentiment.
- Consider which social media platforms are the most important to your marketing strategy, and which ones you may be expanding into in the future, then prioritize dashboard solutions that will let you analyze these platforms effectively.
- Research the different kinds of data visualizations that are available through social media dashboards, which ones are going to be the most useful to your stakeholders, and how well your potential dashboard solutions will be able to accommodate these.
- Assess your need for training and ongoing technical support, then make a point to research how different solutions will meet these needs.
Making Your Social Media Dashboard Work For You
Whether you’re looking to adopt a social media dashboard for the first time or you’re in the market for a replacement for your current analytics solution, we hope this guide has given you a better idea of the role your dashboard will play in your campaigns, and how to find a solution that’s right for your needs.
If you’re looking to try a detailed, intuitive dashboard with a range of powerful AI enhancements, sign up to Highperformr for free today!
