Enhance Your Marketing Efforts With a Social Media Dashboard

jross

June 18, 2021 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

Quick Navigation

What is a Social Media Dashboard?
Different Social Media Dashboards
Best Social Media Dashboard Tools & Apps
Top Social Metrics for KPI Driven Marketers
Benefits of Using a Social Media Dashboard
Must-Have Social Media Dashboard Features for Brands
How to Build a Social Media Dashboard

Social media is an essential part of any content marketing strategy. With a wealth of social sites available to modern consumers and a growing number of shoppers engaging on these platforms, it’s crucial that you place your content in the most relevant feeds. Save time, improve performance, and assess your analytics in new and powerful ways with a social media dashboard to help handle your campaigns.

Image via Unsplash by @austindistel

What is a Social Media Dashboard?

A social media dashboard tracks analytics and manages activity across multiple platforms.

This online tool helps you keep track of your social media engagement and calendar. While a few social media dashboards are site-specific, the most powerful ones work with several top social sites at once, aggregating essential information.

Different Social Media Dashboards

There are several types of dashboards that you can access for social media management. Focus on one or choose a tool that incorporates them all.

Twitter Analytics

These analytics tell you how your posts perform on Twitter. This includes tweet impressions, tweet engagement, visits to your Twitter profile, mentions on the platform, follower growth, and top tweets. You may even have access to the demographics of your Twitter followers.

Social Media Performance

Social media performance is a broad overview of how all your social media campaigns are engaging your audience. This includes interactions, conversions, and growth. A social media dashboard can help you analyze your performance across multiple sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

Facebook Ads

Facebook ads are paid advertisements featured on Facebook. This is different from Facebook posts, which are free to share. When monitoring performance metrics for Facebook ads, it’s especially important to track your ROI. A social media dashboard aggregates all your social analytics so you can easily compare the performance of an unpaid post to a Facebook ad that you put money behind.

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tracks your brand mentions. This helps you see what people are saying about your company. Not all mentions come from followers, so it’s important to actively listen in on what others are saying about you, whether they’ve been actively connecting with your posts or not. Social media monitoring enables you to respond to comments around your brand and potentially resolve problems in cases where your mentions aren’t positive.

Social Media Manager

A full social media manager incorporates all the features of a social media analytics dashboard, alongside other tools that will streamline the process of making social posts. This type of dashboard may include features like content suggestions, design tools, scheduled posting, link shortening, social listening, and more.

Social Media Metrics

Social media metrics are the critical numbers that make up your analytics. A metrics dashboard features insightful visual representations like line graphs and bar graphs to help you understand your social performance at a glance. Every social media dashboard features social media metrics in some form, but the exact method of visualization varies, so it’s important to choose one that works for your marketing style.

Facebook Engagement

A Facebook engagement dashboard focuses exclusively on your Facebook performance. This dives deep into metrics like Facebook follower demographics, likes, referrals, conversions, and events. It will help you understand which posts are most effective on Facebook, and what kind of engagement you’re getting from them.

Web and Social

A web and social dashboard examines the correlation between your social media performance and your website traffic. This dashboard takes a more holistic approach to your marketing strategy, evaluating exactly how your social spending translates into real customer engagement, purchases, and loyalty.

Best Social Media Dashboard Tools & Apps

You can find dozens of dashboards online, but some are more robust or distinctive than others. Rather than spend your time figuring out how to set up a dashboard in Google, Facebook, Twitter, or another individual site, you can use more versatile tools to set up dashboards that work across multiple accounts. Many of these options offer a free social media dashboard to get you started, and all have paid plans that help you make the most of their features.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) platform with a full suite of tools that can help you manage your marketing. Both the Professional and Enterprise versions of HubSpot come with a social media management tool that allows you to connect as many as 300 accounts. You can schedule up to 10,000 posts a month and plan your calendar a full three years in advance.

HubSpot helps you monitor all your social media interactions and even lets you reply to comments within the HubSpot platform. Detailed social reports help you evaluate analytics for social media across every channel and understand exactly how customers are responding to your campaigns.

Later

Later focuses heavily on Instagram marketing, but offers tools that expand into other social realms as well. Later helps you optimize your Linkin.bio, schedule posts and stories, and analyze your hashtags, traffic, sales, and post performance. If you don’t have mountains of content yourself, Later will also help you find relevant content online and put your own unique spin on it.

Later also offers scheduling for other sites, including Facebook, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The drag-and-drop social media calendar is highly visual and pleasantly simplified, so you can see what’s coming up at a glance. Built with photos and videos in mind, this social media dashboard is best for marketing campaigns that are heavy on visuals.

Sendible

Sendible is a powerful social media dashboard that allows you to work with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, and Google My Business in one place. Handy integrations with Google Drive, Dropbox, YouTube, and Canva make it easy to pull your content into the platform and build your social media calendar. You can schedule posts in bulk and group them into marketing campaigns to streamline multiple marketing efforts at once. Sendible also offers content suggestions and RSS management.

In-depth analytics are available in the Reports Hub via over 250 modules. You can generate email reports, presentations, and in-depth evaluations of your campaigns in just a few clicks. Sendible is an ideal platform for collaborations and teamwork with tools that are designed to help everyone work together toward your social media goals.

Tailwind

Designed for Instagram and Pinterest, Tailwind helps you make your social media posts as visually engaging as possible. This program offers a hashtag finder that helps you find the most relevant and popular tags for your content, so you can increase your reach and improve your performance. In-depth design settings for your Pinterest posts help you enhance your branding and create a distinctive style that’s sure to stand out.

Tailwind’s communities help frequent Pinners connect, find their niche, and grow their community. Analytics for both Pinterest and Instagram provide a more in-depth look at how your posts are performing so you can tailor your content accordingly and get the best results possible on these platforms.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social takes an extremely data-driven approach to social media management, delivering in-depth analytics that you can filter by platform or aggregate across all your social media accounts. You can also track your competitors’ performance across social media platforms to see how your company measures up to others in the industry. With hundreds of analytics and customizable reports, you can dig deep and get the information you need easily.

Built for teamwork, Sprout Social offers both team and task reports that show you how often and how quickly your team members respond to messages on your social media sites. Relationship-building tools help you focus on providing personalized service so you can create a highly engaged social media presence.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar simplifies your social media posts in the extreme. This social media dashboard pulls content automatically from your library to keep your social media accounts active, re-sharing your previous posts continuously to give you as much exposure as possible. It works with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. You can automate weekly time slots for particular types of posts so your followers know when to expect a dose of funny cat memes or DIY videos. You can even instruct this tool to automatically generate variations to your content so your posts never get stale.

MeetEdgar monitors post engagement and offers A/B variations so you can easily run tests to see what’s working best. Though the functionality isn’t as robust as other social media dashboards, this approach is unique and keeps the content effortlessly flowing.

Top Social Metrics for KPI Driven Marketers

The right KPI can tell you in an instant whether you’re struggling, chugging along at a steady pace, or excelling. Social media campaigns are extremely KPI driven with insightful factors that can easily let you know if and how you’re connecting to your audience. Essential social metrics that you need to consider include:

Impressions: The number of times your post appears in someone’s feed.
Followers: The number of people who follow your content.
Audience growth: The rate your followers increase at.
Reach: The number of people who have seen your content.
Potential reach: The number of people who could see your post based on shares.
Mentions: The number of people who mention your brand on social media.
Share of voice: Your brand’s exposure based on mentions as compared to other brands in your industry.
Likes: How many times people click the like button.
Comments: The number of comments on a post.
Applause rate: The number of positive interactions only.
Average engagement rate: All post interactions divided by your total number of followers.
Amplification rate: The number of followers who share your content.
Conversion rate: The number of people who performed your CTA compared to the number who clicked on the post.
Click-through rate: The percentage of people who viewed the post and clicked on it.
Web traffic: The number of visits your website receives as a result of your social media campaigns.
Bounce rate: The percentage of people who clicked through but quickly left the subsequent page.
Lead conversion rate: The percentage of leads that eventually make a purchase from you.
Non-revenue conversation rate: The percentage of leads who perform an action that doesn’t generate revenue such as signing up for a newsletter.
Issues resolved: The percentage of problems brought up via social media that your team successfully resolves.
Cost per click: How much you pay for the number of clicks that you get.
Cost per thousand impressions: How much you pay for every thousand people who scroll past your post.

Benefits of Using a Social Media Dashboard

Working with an effective social media marketing and management dashboard will boost productivity and increase effectiveness within your social media campaigns. Marketing professionals have a big job, even in a small business. Social media dashboards streamline collaboration, simplify scheduling, and deliver intuitive analytics that make it easier than ever to evaluate the effectiveness of your campaigns and make mindful adjustments to your approach.

Must-Have Social Media Dashboard Features for Brands

When you’re selecting a social media dashboard for your brand, it’s important to know what essential features to look for. Look for dashboards that offer powerful elements, like:

Intuitive social media calendar.
Collaboration tools for teamwork.
Integration for all your social media accounts.
Analytics that evaluate the metrics most important to your company.

How to Build a Social Media Dashboard

To build an effective social media dashboard, you need to:

Identify the social channels you will use.
Know your company’s goals.
Learn about the tools you need to more effectively meet your marketing goals.

With this information in hand, you can begin comparing the top contenders for a paid or free social media management dashboard. The products listed above can simplify your search and easily answer the question of where to find a social media dashboard. Once you’ve found a good fit for your brand, you can begin connecting your accounts and simplifying your marketing efforts.

Social media dashboards help you take your content promotion to another level. CopyPress can help you put together engaging, high-quality content so you always have a ready supply to schedule and share on your social sites.