How to Build The Ultimate Social Media Dashboard (+ Examples)

On an average day, there’s a lot on your plate.

Scrambling to create and post last-minute content on all social platforms.

Spending hours on different social media accounts engaging with followers. 

Dissecting every post (paid and organic, both) on every social platform to gather critical social media data. 

Manually creating social media reports on Excel to show to your clients. 

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To optimize your time, streamline your workflow, and grow your marketing agency, you need a tool. And that’s where a social media dashboard comes in. 

What is a social media dashboard?

It is a tool that allows agencies and marketers to integrate performance data from all social media platforms in one place. 

In simpler terms, it displays all your posts, helps you monitor your social platforms, track key metrics in real-time, and create digestible reports to show clients. 

Basically, every social media manager’s dream come true. 

Why do you need a social media dashboard?

Are you a marketing agency, helping businesses find value from social media? 

Chances are you’re juggling multiple social media accounts for multiple clients. Each social platform has different content requirements, metrics and KPIs you need to track, and goals you need to meet.

To streamline and automate your workflow (and ultimately grow your business), you need a social media dashboard.  

As Glenn Carol, managing director for Click Marketing says, “I love to use a social dashboard to manage all the social media accounts on one platform. It makes it so convenient to schedule multiple posts at one time, and smoothly manage social media ads. It helps you connect with multiple social networks and monitor multiple accounts.”

Here’s how using a social media dashboard can help you.

Improves productivity

As a social media manager, chances are you’re juggling a lot of social media accounts. Manually posting on each platform, tracking results, and running multiple social marketing campaigns can be very time-consuming. 

Ultimately, causing productivity loss.

Investing in a dashboard can greatly improve your productivity levels and help minimize repetitive tasks.  

After all, 67% of survey respondents in a harmon.ie study believe it would be easier to focus on work if important information from all their apps appeared in a single window.

Helps stay on top of data

To survive (and thrive) in the social media marketing world, you need to stay on top of your social media data - on all social accounts. Data helps to improve your social media performance and makes sure you’re meeting all your SMART social goals. 

On a granular level, tracking and visualizing data ensures you’re optimizing the right social media campaigns, spending money on social ads that are working, and engaging with your audience in real-time. In short, it helps you to restructure your social media strategy to improve your ROI.  

 

And that’s where a social dashboard comes in. 

You can aggregate and view all social media data at one glance and make smarter marketing decisions. 

Ace social media collaboration

As a marketing agency, you probably have multiple people working in your team (including interns). There are different departments like design and copywriting involved. Most social media campaigns need approval by the client, too. 

When so many stakeholders are involved, a collaborative social dashboard comes in handy. 

It allows seamless communication with all the different stakeholders. You can assign tasks to different team members, get real-time feedback from clients, and make sure all goals are being met timely. 

What features should be included in a social media dashboard?

Whether you’re working in an agency or as a freelance social media manager, chances are you already have a tool that streamlines your workflow. But does that tool have all the important features necessary to scale your business? 

With so many social media tools and dashboards available online, each one offering different features and catering to a different audience, choosing the right one for your needs can get a tad overwhelming. 

To make that process a little easier for you, we’ve outlined 4 essential features every social media dashboard must-have. 

Manages multiple accounts

Managing multiple accounts separately (and natively) can be a time-draining process. Logging into different accounts, monitoring activity, engaging with your audience, and posting content on different accounts takes up a good chunk of your time. 

Choose a dashboard that allows you to view and monitor your social media activity from one space. 

Tracks performance and audience analytics

Your social media success is dependent on how well you track your social media analytics and optimize your marketing campaigns. 

And we’re not just talking about vanity metrics - likes, shares, and comments. But analyzing top posts and new followers, finding best times to posts, tracking link clicks and page impressions, and monitoring goal conversion rates. All in real-time!

When you're manually posting content, it can get hard (and frankly there’s no time either) to track key social media metrics and key performance indicators. 

But when you’re using a dashboard or a reporting tool, you get all the data you need neatly displayed in one place. A good social media dashboard will also make it easy to extract all this data and create an easy-to-read report to show to clients.  

Allows easy collaboration

If you’re an agency or work in a team with lots of people, a seamless collaboration between teams can optimize your workflow.  

Want to review campaign insights with your marketing team? Or appoint someone to follow up on a negative review? Simply tag them in the dashboard and they’ll receive a notification. 

How to create a social media dashboard?

You know you need a tool to automate and streamline your workflow. You understand that investing in a social media dashboard is vital to your success. 

So, how do you get started? 

Step 1 - Start with a goal

If you’re managing multiple social media accounts, you probably have different goals for each. 

From building brand awareness and improving community engagement to generate leads, set SMART goals for your overall social media marketing strategy and individually each social platform, as well. 

Make sure these goals are attainable and measurable. 

Step 2 - Determine key metrics and KPIs to track

Once you’ve established your social goals, it’s time to make a list of KPIs and metrics you’d like to monitor. 

If your goal is brand awareness, you might need to track post reach, audience growth rate and social share of voice. Similarly, if you’re looking to boost conversions, track conversions, click-through rates (CTR), and bounce rates. 

Step 3 - Choose the right dashboard to automate everything

When it comes to social dashboards, there's no one size fits all solution. Some dashboards are created for enterprises and larger companies, keeping their needs in mind. Others are built for smaller businesses and agencies. 

So you need to choose a social dashboard that offers the solutions and integrations you need while automating repetitive tasks and saving you a lot of time. 

Whatagraph, for example, is an excellent solution for agencies and SMBs. From analyzing top social media posts and engagement metrics to creating quick digestible reports for clients and breaking down important data, it does it all. 

And most importantly, it automates your social media reporting. You get up-to-date social data from all your social networks while you’re sipping your morning coffee. 

An extra perk? It has a top-notch customer support team!

So when choosing a social media dashboard, keep important features in mind. 

Step 4 - Dig into your social media reports

While social media dashboards give a quick digestible report to show to your clients and bosses, most also allow you to see a detailed breakdown of all your analytics. These actionable insights can help you reshape your social strategy and compare different campaigns. 

So don’t be afraid to dive deep into your social media reports and extract important data from them.

10 examples of social media dashboards

There are several different types of social media dashboards and reports you can create. Some examples of social engagement and analytics dashboards and reports include, 

1. Consolidated social media data

A general social media dashboard gives a holistic view of your social media activity - from goal completions to goal conversions. 

2. Facebook engagement 

A Facebook engagement dashboard depicts your total number of followers (or page likes) and the number of likes, shares and comments your posts have received. 

3. Instagram engagement 

Similarly, the Instagram engagement dashboard or an Instagram reporting tool displays total followers, along with reach and impressions. 

It also breaks down the engagement of each post. 

4. Twitter engagement

Twitter engagement dashboard shows your total followers, retweets, and engagement rate. 

5. LinkedIn engagement 

Similar to other social engagement dashboards, the LinkedIn analytics dashboard also gives a quick overview of your total followers and engagement metrics. It further breaks down followers in terms of their seniority and country, giving you an insight into who exactly is following you.  

6. Facebook ads

If you’re using paid social ads to meet your social media marketing goals, Facebook Ads report comes in handy. It gives a performance overview of your Facebook ads, along with a breakdown of important metrics like page leads, conversions, media spend, CPA, CPC, and others.

7. Instagram analytics 

Instagram analytics report covers important metrics like page impressions, followers, likes, profile trends, demographic insights, and post performance. It gives you a detailed look at your Instagram insights. 

8. LinkedIn ads 

LinkedIn Ads report gives an accurate overview of data on your ad spend, conversion rate and CTR. 

If you’re serious about investing in LinkedIn ads (after all, LinkedIn’s ad reach grew by 25 million people in Q4 2020) this report will make your life very easy. 

9. Twitter analytics 

If you want an in-depth analysis of your Twitter profile (track follower growth, view individual tweet performance, and track key metrics), the Twitter analytic reports and dashboards provide it all. 

10. YouTube analytics

With the ROI of video content increasing at breakneck speed, social media managers need to invest in YouTube marketing. Analyze YouTube video performance and monitor individual video metrics through YouTube analytic reports and dashboards. 

Conclusion

Social media dashboards have changed the way agencies and social media managers work. 

As Ron EvanDel Rosario of Thrive Agency says, “A social media dashboard takes all our social media channels and analyzes them to determine how we should post and contribute to social conversations as a whole. 

In addition, it helps streamline our social media marketing efforts by helping us schedule, monitor, and promote our social media posts, then promote and report them to help prepare for our upcoming posts.”

If you’d like to grow your business in 2022 and beyond, invest in a social media dashboard pronto.