How to Create and Use a Social Media Dashboard for Maximum Reporting Efficiency

Collecting social media analytics data for your monthly reporting is key. However, you absolutely need a social media dashboard in order to properly organize and visualize the data, and keep track of all that's important.

With the right dashboard, you get to quantify your brand’s social media performance.

Today we’re gonna find out more about social media analytics dashboards and how to use them effectively to make reporting a lot easier.

How to create a great social media dashboard and improve your reporting

1. What is a social media dashboard
2. How to build a social media dashboard
3. What to include in a social media dashboard
4. Types of social media dashboards
5. How to use Socialinsider to create powerful social media dashboards
6. 4 tools to help you with your social media dashboard

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1. What is a social media dashboard

A social media dashboard is a platform that gathers together various social media metrics to evaluate your strategy's performance, covering KPIs like engagement, audience insights and ads performance.

This platform is meant to unite the data you collect via a social media analytics tool, like Socialinsider, an SEO tool, like Semrush, an ads tool, like Google Ads, and a competitive analysis tool, like Ahrefs.

Looker (Google Data Studio), for example, is a tool that offers you the perfect place to do all that, integrating data from all the tools you're using to assess your brand's evolution.

A great social media dashboard should allow you to look at data at both a macro and micro level.

So, depending on your needs, you can choose to analyze data at a high level, getting an overview of social media performance, or dive deeper at a granular level and do a detailed analysis of any specific metric.

2. How to build a social media marketing dashboard

Integrating all the performance data in a unified social media dashboard is not an easy job. Your choices will directly impact the quality of your reporting.

So, with that in mind, let's learn how to build a dashboard for all your social media analysis needs:

• Define your goals and purpose

Deciding on the goals and overall purpose of your social media performance analysis is key before setting up your social media dashboard.

Do your research, check industry benchmarks, and set realistic, specific goals for your social media performance. That will constitute a strong foundation on which you can begin to build your analytics dashboard.  

• Decide on the type of dashboard you need

Learning about the types of social media dashboards you can create will help you discover which one is suitable in your case.

Find the one that best satisfies your needs and showcases the most important information for you.

Do keep in mind your audience’s social media knowledge level and try to adapt your language and data presentation, making them comprehensible for marketers and non-marketers alike.

• Choose the metrics on which to focus

We know that all social media metrics are important but it is crucial to focus on the ones that decide your brand’s future.

Incorporating these metrics into your dashboard will increase your efficiency in such a way that you’ll be able to build a better plan and well-researched strategy for your next campaign.

3. What to include in a social media dashboard

Social media reporting dashboards can have different functions. You can use them to organize your social media metrics for every platform in one place while also finding new ways to increase brand awareness.

The values of the metrics in your social media dashboard will prove the efficiency of your social media campaigns.

To make sure you gather all the important insights about your brand’s social, your dashboard should include:

• Your dashboard’s goal (just name it)
• A list of important metrics that contribute to your goal being achieved
• A list of social media channels you want to monitor
• The timespan in which you want to attain your goal

4. Types of social media dashboards

Depending on the purpose they serve, social media marketing dashboards can be categorized in different types, the most common of them being:

• Brand awareness dashboard

The brand awareness dashboard is the kind of dashboard which requires a lot of attention and care.

With this type of social media dashboard, you get to centralize data about social media reach, traffic and share of voice.

A brand awareness dashboard provides you with data about mentions and sentiment analysis to know what you have to do next in order to increase brand awareness.

• Social media engagement dashboard

A social media engagement dashboard measures your audience’s interactions with your social media posts.

You can more easily spot performance trends if you track engagement data for more than one quarters or even an entire year.

With a social media engagement dashboard you can check metrics like impressions, engagement, ad spend, conversions and link clicks.

Gathering new insights about engagement data helps you shape a better strategy where you replicate the most successful posts.

3 examples of social media dashboards from Socialinsider

Here are 3 examples of social media reporting dashboards that you can find and use in Socialinsider.

• Benchmarks

The Benchmarks dashboard allows you to compare two or more different brands and see how you compare against your competitors.

Depending on your needs, you can see competitive data for one specific platform, or across all social media channels.

• Strategy - Campaign benchmarks

After you add the social media platforms for at least two brands, you can build a campaign using a common keyword (or hashtag) and then check “Strategy” to see the metrics and evolution of that campaign.

Here I added Starbucks’ campaign for their Frappuccino and these are the results.

• Social listening

Another social media marketing dashboard you could use to improve your marketing game is social listening.

With this AI-powered Socialinsider feature, you can find out what users, clients and prospects say about your brand on social media.

Here I used social listening to research Starbucks' campaign “Frappuccino” and see how many people have used their hashtag.

5. How to use Socialinsider to create powerful social media dashboards

Using a social media marketing dashboard to improve your social media strategy is essential. Having all the data you need on social media metrics in one place is pure bliss.

Socialinsider can be in charge of your social media KPIs and competitive data, offering you a lot of useful features to include in your unified social media marketing dashboard.

The insights you get via a social media dashboard will help you maximize the efficiency of your monthly, quarterly and yearly reporting.

This way, by looking at your brand's evolution on every social media platform, you will know on which to focus more to obtain greater results.

Socialinsider is more than a complex social media analytics tool. It provides valuable features like social media reporting, campaign reporting, competitive analysis and benchmark, and social listening.

However, the greatest asset, when it comes to social media dashboards, is related to the integration with Looker (Google Data Studio).

Looker (Google Data Studio) is a tool that offers you the place where you can build a custom social media dashboard.

By integrating one or more tools, you can gather the needed data in one place. And that place can be Looker, showing you all insights in a unified dashboard.

Socialinsider is integrated with Looker via a key that helps to export the data from the analytics tool to the social media dashboard.

After you set up the Socialinsider x Looker integration, you can select to see data like social media metrics or existing projects, while choosing the platform for which you want to see the KPIs.

You can add data from social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, including post level metrics, benchmarks metrics and profile times-based metrics.

With all this data about social media media gathered under the same dashboard, it gets easier to adjust your marketing strategy as you go, joggling with types of content, captions’ length and posting time to overpower the algorithm.

6. 4 tools to help you with your social media dashboard

• Looker

Looker, previously known as Google Data Studio, is a helpful tool where you can unify a lot of data you gather from more tools into a single custom social media dashboard.

With Looker, you can integrate social media analytics tools, ads tools, competitive analysis tools and even Google Analytics to get a broader sense of your brand's performance.

You can get in-depth data, depending on what custom data you want to see. The look and feel of this tool will ease your work when developing periodical social media reporting.

• Tableau

Tableau is another tool that can be used as a unified social media dashboard. This is a business intelligence and reporting tool.

Tableau helps you make data-driven decisions, after analyzing the insights you've integrated from other analytics tools.

• Power Bi

Power Bi is a tool similar to Looker Studio (Google Data Studio).

This is a scalable platform where you can connect and visualize the data you get via social media analytics, ads tools and competitive analytics.

Due to its intuitive reports, you can make informed decisions based on the data you collect from all social media tools you use.

• Databox

Databox is another tool you can use as a social media dashboard. This tool also offers integration with a lot more other tools to help brands learn more about their performance and develop accurate reports.

Final thoughts

With a suite of social media dashboards, you will surely get more efficient when developing your periodic social media reports.

Find the right dashboards to include in your day to day analysis for your brand's performance and you will not only make your strategy work, but you will also improve it.

Frequently Asked Questions about Social Media Dashboards

1. How can I get access to a social media dashboard for free?

You can access a free social media dashboard by choosing one of the free dashboard tools for visualizing your metrics and KPIs: Datapad, Grafana, Databox, Dasheroo, FineReport, Metabase, Google Data Studio, Matomo, Tableau, and Inetsoft.

2. Can I make my own social media dashboard?

Yes, you can create and customize your own social media dashboard using different tools, including Socialinsider.

3. Which tool is best for creating a social media dashboard?

• Best for Built-In Analytics and Support: Tableau.
• Best for Visualization and Included Library/Templates: Grafana.
• Best for Integrations/Datasources: Google Looker Studio.
• Best for Pricing: Microsoft Power BI.
• Best for Third-Party Connectors: Klipfolio.