A mini 4-point guide on how to create, manage and optimize social media dashboards and improve daily social media marketing activity.
Let’s start by clarifying: what are social media dashboards ? These are online workspaces – as well as exportable in presentation format – which allow you to view data, indicators, metrics and data visualization solutions relating to your social media marketing activities in a single interface.
Social media dashboard: why they are needed
Present in every professional social listening , monitoring and analytics tool , they are precious allies for every Analyst, Community Manager , Digital Strategist or Social Media Manager to improve daily activity through some tangible benefits:
- optimization of reportingwith KPIs immediately accessible without the need to work on selection filters;
- better management of Customer Careactions and cases on social networks, Community Management and Real-Time Marketing with real-time data, which can be quickly consulted and associated with specific alerts. For example, when the volume of mentions on a topic reaches certain thresholds;
- operational efficiencyof work through modular and flexible access for each member of the team depending on the customer, project or campaign.
In addition, agencies can take advantage of social media dashboards to enrich their propositions, when they are in the tender phase, with audits of the brand prospect and its competitive scenario. To deepen this point, I refer you to my dedicated article on the Digimind blog.
However, the different combinations of metric selection, data visualization and cross-sectional dimensions risk creating more confusion than clarity and consequently documents not easily searchable. For this reason, a precise methodology must be followed to create effective social media dashboards that are able to facilitate operations.
So, in this article you will find a mini 4-step guide to create and manage your social media dashboards . Happy reading and if you have any doubts or questions, I’ll wait for you in the comments.
1.Select the metrics
First of all, we need to clearly define the objectives we want to achieve. Later, we will select a few metrics but strongly related to prefixed goals, customer needs, campaigns and activations. Furthermore, it is important to decide upstream a convention for the nomenclature of the different modules / portlets that will make up each single dashboard. This action is used to facilitate consultation by Team members and the customer, if they access the reports directly in the chosen platform.
Below, you will find an example relating to reputation management :
Brand visibility and reputation
The modules to use : conversation themes and tag clouds, sentiment and bar charts, weight of the different platforms and donut charts, unique authors and influencer maps, demographics and interests on the main speakers.
How to name them : themes of greatest impact, perception of the brand, visibility by channel, weight of speakers, mapping of the audience.
2. Integrate your metrics
Social listening, monitoring and analytics metrics offer a great overall picture. However, they must be accompanied by other indicators in order to have a really accurate overview. In fact, today the points of contact with consumers are diverse and multifaceted and consequently some performance indicators pass through other channels: website, shop, interactions with customer service, profiling via CRM, etc. Reason why, after exporting your social media dashboards, the reporting phase must be enriched with the most relevant KPIs that clearly show the approximation to the goal.
A model relating to customer care :
- net promoter score
To calculate it, customers must be asked, through questionnaires, how much they would be willing to recommend the company and / or the service on a scale of 1 to 10; - customer satisfaction score
This score is also based on a survey and is calculated by asking the user, after a problem has been solved, to rate the service on a scale of 1 to 5; - response
time The average response time; - implementation
time The average time to resolve a case or to complete an action; - resolution rate
The total number of cases resolved in a given time frame in relation to the volume of requests.
3. Make the data operational
Data analysis does not end its task with the preparation and sending of reports to the customer. On the contrary, it must generate operational insights to model, refine and evaluate its actions in the medium and long term. Having concrete information on trends, consumption habits, purchasing behaviors, the presence of competitors and market positioning at your disposal allows you to obtain a real competitive advantage and to make the most of your work.
For this reason it is necessary to associate alerts and automated workflows to social media dashboards based on expressions, keywords and volumes of mentions. In this way, the team will be updated in real time and will be able to act promptly. Here are some practical applications:
- Increase in negative sentiment relating to a competitor
Clear indicator of a criticality to be exploited to decline profiled offers and social selling actions ; - Information classification
In this case, on the basis of volumes, averages and topics of the conversations, we will automatically assign mentions to certain members of the Team on the basis of skills and area of intervention. This is a particularly useful feature for customer care on social networks; - Target segmentation and mapping
Reports on changes in the average of mentions, in relation to the different platforms, according to interests, demographics and location.
4. Optimize in progress
Constant fine-tuning is key to improving the quality of your social media dashboards. Content is key and you don’t have to limit yourself to layouts and formats. This is why it is necessary to be able to carve out dedicated moments for internal verification and to integrate customer feedback . A suggestion, during the first months, schedule at least thirty minutes a day to validate or deny your initial choices, verify the data and plan changes.
The main interventions you can implement:
- keep your dashboards constantly updated
Make sure your forms are in line with the team’s goals and needs. Then, add or delete portlets based on the evidence emerged from the analysis, insert previously not considered metrics and possibly create new dashboards regarding key insights; - consider the needs of the reader
It is useless to set up extremely complex dashboards with an excessive amount of modules, as it will not facilitate use. On the contrary, it selects only the dimensions of value and plans a storytelling of the data that meets the needs, needs and requests of the client. In addition, it always presents the context. If the customer accesses the dashboards directly, I recommend that you combine your numbers with notes and qualitative assessments. Very often Managers have little time available and consequently overlook some information that we can take for granted.
Finally, do not forget that the analysis and reporting activity must always be preceded by the structuring of work flows , definition of resources (internal know-how and budget) and scheduling of the moments of validation, approval and review.