The Best Way to Create Social Media Dashboards for Data-Driven Marketing

Crafting a good social media dashboard makes understanding what's happening with your campaigns easier. Are images doing better than videos on Facebook; is Instagram helping to sell more? To keep up with others, you need to quickly get this information without wasting time checking different sources.

A good dashboard contains the important numbers in one place and includes real-time data, for instance: Facebook's video engagement, Instagram's sales impact, or Twitter's traffic contribution.

In this article, we're sharing the most important metrics a solid social media dashboard must include and the steps to create a custom dashboard. This will help you improve your social media activities by quickly seeing what works and what doesn't.

Social Media Dashboards can be called game-changers, as they save loads of time on repetitive tasks. Instead of spending hours manually compiling data from different media, you might only need 20 minutes to generate a complete report. The dashboard automatically collects and organizes the data, giving you more time to analyze and create better campaign content.

Social Media Dashboards help focus on important things: adjusting bids, updating keywords, and testing different ad content. It's not just about looking at numbers but about choosing the right numbers that truly show how well (or not) things are going. These dashboards help figure out the campaigns that make a real difference and help work smarter, not harder.

The main benefit of Social Media Dashboards is tracking performance across various channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. Social media platforms offer APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) that allow the dashboard to connect and gather data from each channel.

APIs are then integrated into the dashboard, and data is pulled automatically. For instance, you can link your Facebook Ads account, Twitter account, and other social media profiles to the dashboard. Rather than logging into each platform separately to check performance, you can access your dashboard to view all figures within a single interface.

Additionally, dashboards offer customizable reporting features and allow you to create reports that focus on the metrics most relevant to your marketing goals.

Social media dashboards track metrics that measure your online performance: likes, comments, shares, follower growth rate, post reach, click-through rates, conversions, impressions, customer sentiment, response times, and competitive benchmarks. Let's take a look at them:

The 2 metrics that show visibility on social media are reach and impressions. For videos, you can track video views (how often a video gets watched) and video completion rates (the percentage of viewers who watch the entire video).

Likes, comments, shares, and engagement rate show if users are interested in your content. Generally, a lot of likes suggest content is well-received, while many comments signal active engagement. When comments outnumber likes, it usually means deeper audience involvement and potential for conversation or community building. All in all, understanding context and goals is important when you have to analyze these metrics.

Including growing Click-Through Rates (CTR) in a social media dashboard is needed for understanding audience behavior and content performance. A rising CTR during a campaign means that it's catching attention and driving traffic. By tracking CTR trends, you can understand how well your efforts turn into website visits and potential conversions.

Conversions on social media mean user actions, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or completing a form after engaging with your content. Including conversions in your Social Media Dashboard is important because it helps understand what makes people take action after seeing your posts.

Tracking audience follower growth involves gathering these metrics:

1. Number of Followers (New and Total) shows how many people follow you overall and how many have joined recently.
2. Followers Breakdown (By Job Title, Interests, Groups, etc.) sorts followers by job titles or interests. It helps see who's following you, guiding what content to share.
3. Followers Growth Rate measures how fast the number of followers changes and shows if your content engages people over time.

These metrics help you understand how to connect and share content that attracts specific groups.

Monitoring relevant words or phrases helps measure discussions and sentiments surrounding your brand, ensuring you're part of relevant conversations; while tracking brand-specific or trending hashtags is a key to boosting brand visibility, and joining conversations related to your brand or industry.

A good Social Media Dashboard goes beyond displaying statistics from social media platforms. It provides lots of insights and helps you understand better the performance across various channels.

You can rely on a Social Media Dashboard to actively support and track various platforms. This allows you to analyze your complete online presence effectively, all in one place.

Apart from showing basic likes or shares, an effective dashboard offers demographic breakdowns of your audience. This includes job titles, interests, or geographic locations, empowering targeted content creation based on specific audience segments.

Moreover, it can track the effectiveness of paid campaigns and present data on ad reach, click-through rates, and conversions, that help calculate a campaign ROI.

Additionally, the dashboard might make sentiment analysis: how your audience feels about your brand or campaigns.

By following these steps, you can make a Social Media Dashboard that fits your business goals:

Define your business objectives – whether it's boosting brand awareness, driving website traffic, generating leads, or increasing sales. Clear goals lay the ground for the custom dashboard.

Identify specific insights needed to meet your objectives.

• Audience Engagement: How engaged is your audience with your content? What types of posts gather the most likes, comments, or shares?
• Platform Performance: Which social media platform generates the most website traffic or leads? How does each platform contribute to your overall goals?
• Content Effectiveness: What content types or topics resonate best with your audience? Which posts drive the most conversions or click-throughs?
• Audience Insights: Who is your audience? What are their demographics, interests, or geographic locations? What types of content do they engage with the most?
• Campaign Effectiveness: How successful are your social media ad campaigns? Are they leading to conversions or meeting set objectives?
• ROI and Cost-Efficiency: How much are you spending on social media advertising, and what's the return in terms of conversions or sales?

Based on these questions, pinpoint essential metrics and KPIs that measure progress. This could include engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and audience demographics.

Gather data from all relevant social media platforms where your brand has a presence – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Use native analytics tools or APIs for data collection.

Step 5: Integrate Website Performance Data

Add website analytics metrics: traffic, page views, bounce rates, and conversion rates in your dashboard. This shows how social media activities influence website performance and user behavior.

Step 6: Connect Costs with Conversions

Tie data on social media ad spending with conversion metrics. This helps evaluate the ROI of your social media campaigns and see if they are cost-effective.

Step 7: Use the Template to Speed Up Reporting

Dashboard templates make reporting faster because they provide a ready-made layout where you can put in new information without starting from scratch. With graphs and tables already set up, it's simpler to understand the data. Using a template also means reports look the same each time. Of course, you can adjust the template if needed, and when it's time to update, just change the numbers.

Templates are great for teamwork as everyone uses the same structure, making it easy to work together and share information.

Step 8: Automate Data Processing

Use automation tools or software to collect and process data, as well as for dashboard updates. With these tools, you will always use up-to-date data.

Social Media Dashboards offer a big picture and help manage multiple social media channels. Here's how they provide a strategic edge:

You can access up-to-the-minute insights into ongoing campaigns, audience behavior, and content performance. With this timely data, you can make agile and informed decisions, change strategies on the go to profit from the opportunities, or improve underperforming areas.

Dashboards help check on how audiences interact with content. Likes, comments, shares, and click-through rate measures audience sentiment, which helps understand what resonates with the audience.

With the help of dashboards, conversion rates, reach, impressions, and follower growth are available in one place, which simplifies tracking progress and helps evaluate how effective the social media strategies are.

Dashboards are perfect tools for managers as they can customize reporting based on specific campaign goals and KPIs. Moreover, they can generate reports according to stakeholders' needs, and show overall campaign progress and results.

Dashboards help study how customers behave on social media, and find out what they like and don't like. For example, watching what people say about a brand online helps create ads that connect with what customers want.

If you want to save time analyzing data on different channels, marketing analytics tools can help you with collecting numbers, creating reports, and managing your social media.

OWOX BI is here to help you keep track of all relevant metrics across different social media platforms online. No matter how many social media you use, it will gather information from all channels, give you ready-made templates, set up automatic updates and reports just the way you want.