CuriousOwl

What is a Social Marketing dashboard?

A social marketing dashboard is an analytics and visualisation tool that companies can use to manage their presence across different social media channels or accounts.

The dashboard aggregates data from multiple data sources through a single interface, making it easy to view the impact of marketing efforts across multiple social media channels.

A social marketing dashboard can be either for a single platform (like TweetDeck for Twitter) or for multiple platforms (like HootSuite or SproutSocial).

Why does a company need a social marketing dashboard?

The primary requirement of any social marketing activity is the ability to measure the effort, investment and outcome dedicated to that activity. The growth of social media channels has led to a huge increase in the amount of data that can be tracked, measured, and analysed.

A social marketing dashboard helps social marketing teams segregate and present the most important and relevant information and measure the most important metrics for the company.

It provides company management with real-time updates on the status of social marketing campaigns and allows the social marketing team to present and explain their strategies easily. In addition, companies can use this data to make more informed business decisions, particularly when designing social media marketing campaigns.

Social Marketing dashboard design – overview

A social marketing dashboard should make the process of publishing (or posting) on social media efficient, effective, and standardised. This requires features such as:

1. Collaboration tools to add members to the content creation team
2. Content scheduling
3. Permissions control to determine who can approve posts
4. Social media listening tools to monitor conversations on multiple platforms to manage feedback from people about the company and/or its products and services

Companies need to analyse the data they receive from social marketing to manage their customer service and engagement and marketing intelligence efforts. Therefore, a useful social marketing dashboard needs to have at least basic analytics features.

Most social marketing dashboards offer capabilities to filter and analyse social media data from multiple data points. For example, integration with Google Analytics or similar tools helps companies carry out more advanced reporting and analytics to go deeper into the data and track specific metrics and KPIs related to social media and its engagement.

A typical social marketing dashboard could look like this:

How do we create a social marketing dashboard?

Every company has its requirements and objectives, and the dashboard must be designed keeping those specific requirements in mind. However, all social marketing dashboards should answer the following questions:

1. Who will view the social marketing dashboard?
2. What information will they require?
3. What is their level of knowledge about social marketing metrics?
4. What is their level of comfort with social marketing data?

An effective social marketing dashboard communicates a clear and easy-to-understand message, so the above questions help decide the dashboard’s structure and output.

It is also important to choose suitable visual presentation formats so that the data that is presented is easy to read by different audiences if required.

What are the key metrics on a social marketing dashboard?

All social marketing dashboards should have the following data as a minimum requirement:

1. Channels
2. Followers
3. Content Engagement
4. Impressions
5. Reach
6. Post Clicks
7. Likes, Comments, and Shares
8. Average Video Watch Time
9. Retweets and Mentions

A social marketing manager who requires all the above data could have a dashboard that looks like this:

Which platforms should a social marketing dashboard cover?

A company usually has a presence across some or all the major social media channels. The social marketing dashboard it develops should have the following data sources:

1. Facebook Business Manager
2. Facebook Ads
3. Facebook Insights
4. Instagram
5. Instagram Ads
6. LinkedIn Pages
7. LinkedIn Ads
8. Twitter Ads
9. YouTube

The dashboard should also ideally include the other digital analytics tools used by the company, such as SEO and Google Analytics.

This presents a holistic view of the entire digital marketing efforts of the company and allows the marketing teams to track the impact of each campaign on the company’s overall digital strategy.

We will examine two important social marketing channel dashboards here – Instagram and LinkedIn.

What is an Instagram marketing dashboard?

Instagram, an image-sharing app, has over 500 million monthly active users, making it an extremely important social marketing channel for small or big companies.

An Instagram dashboard allows the user to see what kind of images the audience reacts to and engages with. It aggregates the key metrics to track the success of an Instagram campaign over a period. This dashboard enables tracking of various metrics – Reach, Impressions, Engagement Rate, Link Clicks, and Followers – which provide a detailed analysis of the viability of the company’s Instagram strategy.

A typical Instagram dashboard looks like this:

What is a LinkedIn marketing dashboard?

LinkedIn is the world’s most popular professional social network with over 250 million unique monthly visitors and is used in over 200 countries worldwide.

A LinkedIn dashboard allows a company to track the key metrics required to gauge the success of its LinkedIn For Business and LinkedIn Page social marketing strategy. The main metric is “Followers”, which can be further sliced and segmented by Geography, Industry, Job Role and Seniority. It also presents post-performance metrics such as Shares, Likes, Mentions and Comments.

A typical LinkedIn dashboard looks like this:

Best free social marketing dashboard tools

Whether small or big, companies may not find it easy or convenient to post content on different social marketing channels and track the performance of each channel. A social marketing dashboard helps make this process very simple. But the set-up cost and continuing investment may be prohibitive for small and medium companies.

These companies can choose from a host of free social marketing dashboard tools which give optimum solutions for data aggregation, analysis and presentation. Some of the key tools are:

1.       Later

2.       Sendible

3.       HubSpot

4.       SproutSocial

5.       Tailwind

6.       MeetEdgar

What are the benefits of using a social marketing dashboard?

The biggest advantage of a social marketing dashboard is that it does away with the need to maintain a large team to keep track of various channels. There are many other benefits also:

1. Time management
2. Competition tracking
3. Task automation (scheduling and auto-responses)
4. Brand engagement tracking
5. Post effectiveness
6. New customer management
7. Website traffic source tracking

Conclusion

Social marketing dashboards help marketing teams consolidate data from various social media channels and highlight the most relevant data and metrics. In addition, social marketing dashboards keep the focus on social media KPIs and help management make quick and informed decisions on adjusting their social marketing resources allocation.