You’re in a meeting with senior executives and stakeholders and they ask you to quantify your team’s performance across social channels and accounts. You also need to explain how your performance influences company goals. Sounds familiar?
You know raw social analytics is complex, and sharing it with people who have limited hands-on-the-keyboard social experience is ineffective. So, instead of getting granular, you provide them with a digestible overview of your most important KPIs. You tell a compelling data story that helps them visualize how your customer care, awareness and engagement efforts matter to your company’s big picture. You captivate your audience and prove the power of social.
How did you do this? Using a social media dashboard to glean vital insights from your data will help you successfully convey your team’s impact every time.
To help you get to this ideal scenario, we’re highlighting examples of social media dashboards you can use to illustrate the value of social media across your business.
What is a social media dashboard?
A social media dashboard is a tool that aggregates your crucial social media metrics across networks to quickly measure the performance of your posts/campaigns, customer care interactions and community engagement. Social media dashboards empower you to dissect results, iterate strategy, demonstrate value and influence decision making.
The Importance of a strategic social media analytics dashboard
The right social media dashboard makes all the difference for brands that rely on their online presence. Dashboards provide a summary of social interactions, which help teams respond and engage with trends and customer needs proactively. Here are four benefits you’ll enjoy from a strategic social media analytics dashboard.
1. Easier decision-making with real-time data
A social media dashboard integrates real-time data across social platforms, which helps you to make informed decisions quickly. This immediacy helps you adapt your strategies in response to live customer feedback and market shifts.
2. Streamlined reporting and insights
Dashboards condense complex datasets into actionable insights and simplify reporting. They also make it easier to strategize around data and communicate findings to ensure stakeholders understand the impact of social media efforts.
3. Competitive edge through in-depth analytics
With features like competitive analysis and sentiment tracking, dashboards provide a deeper insight into your performance and that of your competitors. This helps you maintain a competitive edge and fine-tune social media marketing strategies.
4. Optimized ROI
Dashboards highlight the most successful campaigns and tactics, helping businesses allocate resources to optimize marketing spend and improve your ROI.
What insights should your social media dashboard software include?
Every data dashboard serves a different function—from tracking brand awareness to aggregating marketing metrics in one place. Your social media dashboards should be built with your unique use cases in mind. While each dashboard’s ingredients might differ, the core component is visualized metrics that help explain why your brand did or didn’t meet a goal.
To help determine the specifics you should include in your dashboard, ask yourself these six questions:
- What is the goal of this dashboard? (Example: demonstrate positive changes in brand reputation)
- Which metrics matter most to achieving this goal? (Example: sentiment)
- Who is the audience and how much do they know about the topic? (Example: CMO and R&D)
- Which channels need to be measured? (Example: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter)
- What is the duration of time needed to effectively measure change? (Example: one month)
- How do we compare to competitors? (Example: competitive analysis and hashtag monitoring)
Ultimately, you should have multiple social media dashboards for different stakeholders and purposes. For example, one for tracking monthly changes in brand reputation and sentiment, as seen in the example above. Another for sharing quarterly customer care productivity. By using a platform like Sprout Social, you can access and create custom social media dashboard templates that save you time and deliver presentation-ready dashboards for different business segments.
Social media dashboard templates to use across your organization
Here are six types of social media dashboard templates designed to breakdown sophisticated reporting and help refine your data-driven strategy.
Social media engagement dashboard
Social media engagement is a barometer of how much your audience interacts with your content. When examining engagement metrics across months or years, a dashboard with a birds’ eye view helps you identify performance trends in your content strategy. With these insights, you can continuously replicate your successes and iterate on your least popular content.
- Goal: Determine if your content resonates with your audience
- Metrics: Impressions, engagements, link clicks, ad spend and conversions
- Audience: Social media team and other stakeholders who influence content direction
- Channels: Cross-channel or channel-specific
- Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly
Here are a few examples of Sprout Social’s social media engagement dashboards that give you the tools to proactively grow your audience and repeatedly test your content direction.
- Profile Performance Report provides a high-level aggregation of analytics so you get a pulse on the performance of your social profiles. With this report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok metrics to better understand the impact of your social efforts.
- The Post Performance Report helps you analyze your published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience. It provides a unified view of your post performance across all social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok.
- Our Cross-Network Paid Performance Report consolidates paid campaign-level data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. From the Overview tab, you’ll see a summary of your paid performance, impressions, engagements, web conversions, video views and a breakdown of key performance metrics by channel.
Brand awareness dashboard
Brand awareness requires continuous effort and frequent pulse checks. Use data stories to determine your reach, earned media value and share of voice.
- Goal: Analyze rates of target audience recognition and awareness
- Metrics: Impressions, reach, engagements, mentions, earned media value and sentiment
- Audience: Teams across marketing, including social media
- Channels: Cross-channel
- Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly
Sprout’s Listening tools help you tap into global social conversations to extract actionable insights that improve brand health and fuel brand awareness. With Sprout’s Listening dashboards, you can track conversations concerning your brand to illuminate consumer attitudes, gain visibility into customer experience and sentiment, conduct competitive analysis and stay up to date with trends in your industry.
As many social media managers will tell you, achieving organic awareness and reach on social media is harder than ever. At Sprout, our team uses employee advocacy to breakthrough and track our success with brand awareness dashboards in our Employee Advocacy platform.
Here are two examples of employee advocacy dashboards we use on a monthly and quarterly basis:
- Sprout’s Advocacy General Report provides an overview of our latest activity. The report analyzes the number of active stories, total shares and shares across each network, and how that translates into potential reach and earned media value. As you scroll, you’ll see sharing trends, the highest volume of sharing activity and overall story performance, top users by shares and top users by potential reach.
- Sprout’s Advocacy Content Report dives deeper into data gleaned from your active content. You’ll see how many shareable or internal stories were active each day along with a comparison to the previous month. The Content Breakdown chart provides stats on shareable and internal content including days, views, shares, engagement and potential reach for each Story
Social competitive analysis dashboard
Tracking your competition on social media gives you essential insights to make strategic decisions. Keeping an eye on competitors helps you understand how well you do in comparison and helps you to set benchmarks. A social competitive analysis dashboard combines market share, competitor activity and audience engagement to help you gain a competitive edge.
- Goal: Gauge competitive position and strategy effectiveness
- Metrics: Market share, competitor post frequency, engagement rates and sentiment analysis
- Audience: Strategic planners and marketing executives
- Channels: Multiple platforms for comparative analysis
- Cadence: Monthly and quarterly updates
With Sprout’s competitive analysis and social listening tool, you’ll see how well your competitors do on social media. You can compare how often they post, how many people interact with their posts and how many followers they gain.
Social customer care dashboard
Customer care is an essential function of social media. A social customer care dashboard measures, benchmarks and analyzes your team’s efforts, and reveals any critical opportunities to improve customer support. This dashboard is especially important for enterprise brands who typically have larger teams managing an influx of incoming requests across multiple accounts.
- Goal: Provide visibility into customer care team performance
- Metrics: Response rate, action rate, average time to action and total actioned messages
- Audience: Customer care/support teams, sales, marketing and product development
- Channels: Cross-channel inboxes (Pro tip: Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all incoming messages and mentions into a single stream)
- Cadence: Monthly, quarterly and yearly
A customer care dashboard will help you illuminate how many messages your brand receives, your response rate and your average response time, like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report demonstrates
Business intelligence dashboard
A Business Intelligence Dashboard helps to improve your social media marketing strategy by viewing consumer interactions across multiple channels. This dashboard aggregates data and offers in-depth analytics to help you understand how your social media campaigns are performing in relation to business-wide objectives and social media KPIs.
The dashboard combines different data sources, like social media stats and CRM info, to thoroughly examine customer behaviors and preferences. This helps you tweak your strategies to reach the right people with the right messages at the right times. It also helps you optimize your marketing spend by showing which campaigns and channels drive the highest ROI.
The business intelligence dashboard’s key features include tracking user engagement, conversion rates and customer journey patterns from initial contact through conversion. This level of detail provides you with the data to craft more personalized and effective marketing strategies.
- Goal: Track the customer journey across digital touchpoints (including social)
- Metrics: Customized to meet your goals. Examples include engagements per network/per state, ad impressions and email CTR
- Audience: Executives and stakeholders
- Channels: Cross-channel
- Cadence: Quarterly and yearly
As Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector displays, you gain valuable insights by combining the power of social data with other business channels into one dashboard. This ensures social data and insights are included in your 360-degree view of your customers—proving the value social brings to your business.
Executive dashboard
Most executives aren’t immersed in the world of social media on a frequent basis. Metrics that are meaningful to you and your team miss the mark when communicating with the C-suite. As a result, you might struggle to secure buy-in and investment to take your social efforts to the next level.
For best results, create customized reports for leadership that bridge knowledge gaps at the executive level and translate the raw data into a narrative that resonates with anyone in leadership. Create an executive summary of your most compelling social media reports to convince even the most skeptical executives about the impact social has on your business.
- Goal: Deliver clear evidence of the social team’s impact
- Metrics: Customized to each executive. Examples include share of voice, potential reach, earned media value, customer care productivity and competitor analysis data
- Audience: Leadership and teams across marketing, including social media
- Channels: Cross-channel
- Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly
Use Sprout’s My Reports feature to create custom reports to easily track your most valued social data. Choose which metrics are included to evaluate performance based on your specific business goals.
How to create a social media dashboard
To set up your social media dashboard, follow these steps to quickly review and report on your strategy, and highlight your team’s performance.
1. Determine purpose and audience
The first step toward creating a social media dashboard is figuring out its purpose. What goal is this dashboard trying to achieve? Who will it reach? How familiar are they with the topic? Clearly define your purpose and audience before doing anything else.
2. Decide which kind of dashboard to create
Decide which kind of dashboard best fits your needs. Revisit the six social media dashboard types mentioned above for inspiration. Choose a dashboard with relevant metrics that align with your goals and demonstrate social’s value to stakeholders. Be mindful of your audience and their social media experience level when deciding how detailed your dashboard should be.
3. Gather the metrics
Next, you’re ready to dig into the data. Scope out which networks need to be measured and the length of time required to demonstrate meaningful results. Collect raw data across those channels during that time period. You can start by using metrics from the native apps, like engagement rate, reach, followers and plays.To up your sophistication level and simplify your workflow, use a social media analytics tool like Sprout to automate the data collection process and easily generate dashboards that are ready to share.
4. Share with stakeholders
Transform raw figures into riveting dashboards and data visualizations. Use key data points, complementary graphs and your expert analysis to give stakeholders a visual depiction of your team’s progress.
After creating your first dashboard, repeat the first three steps for each dashboard you need. Keep momentum going by updating your dashboards on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis and sharing them with stakeholders often.
Streamline your analytics with Sprout’s social media dashboard
Social media dashboards convert your cumbersome social data into influential stories that are easy to absorb. You’re able to articulate your social ROI to stakeholders across the org by breaking down complexity and clearly communicating your findings.
Start your free trial to access Sprout’s full library of social media dashboard templates.
