Social media dashboards are essential software tools that businesses use to house and manage all their social content in one place.

From creating and publishing individual social posts to tracking and overseeing a large social media strategy – the point of a dashboard is to make it easier to keep on top of everything.

This isn't always easy. Social media is a hungry beast that always needs feeding. You can create the best social media marketing campaign in the world one month and be obsolete the next if you don't keep up the pace.

This guide aims to introduce you to the world of social media dashboards. We're not going to get too detailed here, but we'll show you the dashboard highlights you need to know about to get started with this type of software.

Our aim is to give you a flavor of what to expect when using a dashboard to orchestrate your social media campaigns.

After all, multiple tools can aid in creating strategic and data-driven decisions tailored specifically to your brand's needs. You can therefore get what you need from a dashboard and drop what you don't.

Is a social media dashboard right for me?

Social media dashboards are not reserved solely for large organizations or marketing teams. So, if you're a start-up business or don't have a marketing team behind you, then don't worry.

From small business owners to individual influencers, a dashboard can prove to be an invaluable asset for anyone looking to maximize their online presence.

Of course, if you work for a large corporation or agency, and they don't have a dashboard yet, then it's time to get one.

Understanding and utilizing a social media dashboard will ultimately lead to increased productivity, better insights, and a more effective approach to managing your online accounts and audience.

In this guide

Understanding social media dashboards

Let's start by giving you a quick overview of social media dashboards. They are effectively centralized platforms that pull multiple social media accounts into one place. You can manage, monitor, and analyze your various social media channels seamlessly from there.

That's the idea, anyway. Some dashboards don't let you pull in every social media channel, which can be frustrating.

However, the best – such as Brandwatch – ensure everything is covered so you don't overlook any social media accounts.

But what's the actual point of seeing all your accounts in one place? Well, an effective dashboard lets you analyze content from each one, create and publish posts, interact with audiences, and track key metrics that then filter into your reports.

If the dashboard works as it should then you'll never have to go direct to the individual social media platforms ever again.

Importance of dashboards for social media managers

The ability to keep all social media activity in one place is indispensable for managers. It simplifies day-to-day tasks and boosts efficiency.

Just think about it. Say you work for a large company with four social media teams, each individually covering Facebook, X, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Without a dashboard, it's almost impossible to track what everyone else is doing. Your messaging won't ever be properly aligned, and you'll never gather the data required to prove ROI or strategize for your next campaign.

You might also have a content creation unit that is tasked with fulfilling requests for all four teams. Managing this can be a nightmare, and that's before you consider issues such as cohesive crisis communications.

The dashboard means everyone sees everything in one place, and everyone works together. This streamlines workflows, eases content scheduling, unifies strategies, and makes reporting so much easier.

What's more, you can complete high-level competitor analysis via a dashboard and share those insights with everyone across your social media team.

What does a social media dashboard do?

A social media dashboard should be capable of providing you with the most important insights about your brand's presence on various platforms, while also helping you create and schedule your content.

Social media managers should have everything in one place. That way they can monitor campaigns one minute and jump to writing text for a social media post the next.

Here's a quick breakdown of the core components of a comprehensive social media dashboard:

Data tracking and metrics

A vital feature of your social media dashboard is its ability to provide real-time data tracking. This allows you to:

  • Monitor the current performance of your social media accounts
  • Make informed decisions on your content strategy by observing trends and patterns
  • Spot unexpected changes (positive or negative) and respond accordingly

From here, you can monitor a large range of relevant metrics for your brand. This may include basic engagement, such as:

  • Likes and reactions: Measure the popularity and emotional impact of your posts.
  • Shares and reposts: Understand the virality of your content and its reach.
  • Comments and replies: Gauge your audience's level of interest and involvement.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): Assess the effectiveness of your calls to action.
  • Follower count: Keep track of the total number of followers on each platform.
  • Follower growth rate: Calculate the percentage growth of your followers over time.
  • Audience demographics: Gain insights into the age, location, and other characteristics of your audience, which will help you tailor your content.

Content creation and post scheduling

Gone are the days when brands created and published their posts directly on social media platforms. It's far easier to oversee everything when using a dashboard. You can use photo and video editing software, infographic creators, and AI-powered image generators to make your own visuals.

Write your own captions or get an artificial intelligence to do it for you.

Then, set the best time to schedule posts using data sourced from previous campaigns and those of your rivals.

Suddenly, your social platforms have high-quality posts delivered at the optimal time. All thanks to the social media dashboard.

Competitive analysis

We mentioned it briefly above, but yes, you can analyze your competitors and use that data to make smarter decisions yourself. Brands do this all the time. Competitive analysis helps you learn from the mistakes and successes of others, spot trends, and avoid PR disasters.

A social media dashboard that carries a social listening tool, such as Brandwatch, is ideal for anyone seeking to gain an advantage in their industry.

After all, you can compare key metrics between you and your direct rivals, better understand user behavior, and immediately shape your strategy.

Reporting

A social media analytics dashboard contains a lot of data that you can use to create killer marketing campaigns. However, this data is also vital for reporting back to others within your company.

Whether these are your bosses, fellow stakeholders, or anyone in between, it's important to show accurate data in your social media reports.

These custom reports also have to be readable and visually appealing. After all, very few people actually enjoy looking at pages and pages of raw data. A top social media reporting dashboard will design a great report as well as provide the numbers for it.

Building a social media dashboard

You'd be forgiven for thinking a social media dashboard is too 'big' for your needs. Very few users actually require everything a dashboard provides. However, having the freedom to choose your essential metrics is hugely important.

After all, there's nothing more frustrating than learning from your collected data, and deciding you need more detail on certain engagement metrics, only to learn your dashboard doesn't support those numbers.

Ideally, users should have the flexibility to build their own dashboards and follow the key performance metrics that actually matter to them.

Here's how to do it.

Select the right social media metrics

First, only choose the metrics you want to track. If you're starting at the beginning, then you might not know what your vital metrics are yet. If so, it's likely that you'll begin with the following:

  • Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, mentions, and clicks all demonstrate how actively users are interacting with your content.
  • Reach: The number of unique users who have seen your content, measured by impressions and unique visitors.
  • Conversions: Track the number of users who take desired actions on your website, such as making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter.
  • ROI: Assess the effectiveness of your social media efforts by calculating the return on investment (ROI) for each channel.
  • Sentiment: Using a tool like Brandwatch Listen, you can discover what users think about your brand or product even if they don't directly interact with your social posts.

It's essential to align these common social media metrics with your overall business goals to create a meaningful and actionable dashboard. Otherwise you're just wasting time monitoring metrics that have no bearing on your business objectives.

Integrate multiple social platforms

The point of a social media dashboard is to bring everything into one place, so you don't have to jump around multiple accounts every day. Ensure that you integrate all your active platforms, such as Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn to effectively monitor and analyze your social media performance.

Integration helps with brand consistency across all your platforms. You can oversee an entire scheduling calendar and ensure content goes up on multiple channels at the same time. You can also monitor campaigns with much greater ease and spot crises before they spread.

Communicate in one place

Onboarding your team to the same dashboard means you'll also be able to communicate more effectively. This is hugely important for large companies and agencies, which might have social media teams scattered across the world.

The best dashboards allow you to converse with colleagues, leave notes for others to pick up, assign tasks, and track campaign performance as a team.

Note that you may need to plug in direct messaging software to your dashboard if it doesn't offer its own communications option.

Social media dashboard benefits

There are a lot of advantages to using a social media dashboard, but there are four that truly stand out. Here's a bit more detail on each of them:

1. Efficient data analysis

We cannot stress how important data collection is for improving social media performance. Without data, it's difficult to know what's successful and what isn't, and where to allocate future resources.

You can get the basics, such as follower growth rate, engagement metrics, click-through rates, and conversion rates, by using most top platforms. However, if you want real actionable insights, then software like Brandwatch can help you understand the sentiment behind all this activity.

Learn what social media users really think of your brand and why they talk about it the way they do. See how they interact with your competitors and spot future trends with an awareness dashboard that drives your strategy forward.

2. Enhanced strategic planning

Did we mention driving your strategy? A social media dashboard not only helps you analyze data efficiently but also enhances your planning.

By reviewing the marketing performance of one campaign, you can make informed decisions about the next one. This includes:

  1. Adjusting your content strategy to focus on high-performing social media platforms
  2. Tweaking your posting frequency to better align with audience behaviors
  3. Identifying popular topics and formats to incorporate into future content

Remember, a social media dashboard can really help you monitor your competitors by tracking their performance against your own.

By benchmarking these metrics, you can determine opportunities to differentiate your brand and identify areas of improvement.

3. Optimizing for audience engagement

To maximize audience engagement, it's essential to tailor your content for each platform, considering their unique strengths and user preferences.

You can do this on a platform like Brandwatch. Resize, edit, and repurpose posts to suit each individual platform. Run analysis on your target audience within each of your social media channels to find what content resonates best on each one.

For example, you probably wouldn't upload a viral dance video to LinkedIn, unless you were showing like-minded business people how successful your video was on other platforms.

4. Running competitive analysis

Performing competitive analysis on those within your industry is necessary for refining your social media strategies and staying ahead of your competitors.

In fact, it's often smart to look beyond your industry to understand how other businesses harness the power of social media, influencers, and viral content to boost their brands.

A social media marketing dashboard makes this quick and easy. What's more, you can collect your findings in readable reports that can then be shared with fellow stakeholders.

You'll need to work on your competitive analysis skills before diving in at the deep end here. However, the results can be spectacular.

By understanding your competitors' strengths and weaknesses, you can adopt successful practices and tailor your strategies to outshine them. You might realize there's a gap in your own marketing strategy that needs filling. Or you might spot a mistake your competitors are making, and make decisions to avoid the same errors.

Of course, remember to keep an eye on industry trends and adapt your approach accordingly.

Should I use a social dashboard?

If you're still unsure about using a social media analytics dashboard then don't worry, there's no obligation to jump on one straightaway. New, small businesses often don't use this type of software until they are more confident with where they sit in their industry.

For example, a one-person florist in downtown Detroit probably doesn't need the full range of analytics provided by a robust social media dashboard to understand how to appeal to their customers.

However, a statewide flower retailer might feel a social dashboard is required to take its business to the next level.

Your own social media dashboard needs to work for you. So, before you dive in, think about the key metrics you'd want to get from your dashboard's data, and what actionable insights would provide real value.

From here, you can begin to manually assess your own social media posts to see what's working and what isn't. Do you need deeper insights to boost your social media presence? Or perhaps you need a tool that streamlines the creation and publication of your social media posts.

If so, then it might be worth investing in a dashboard.