Gathering data and information from one or multiple platforms and creating a comprehensive Social Media dashboard is equally important as creating the social content itself. Social media has become one of the most important channels to engage with potential audiences, and that’s not a surprise considering the power and potential of creating content to attract people, target the exact audience you need, and deliver value to your bottom line. Likes, comments, shares, reach, CTR, conversions – all have become extremely significant to optimize and manage regularly in order to grow in our competitive digital environment.

You need to know how the audience responds, whether you need further adjustments, and how to gather accurate, real-time data. Here we will present a Social Media Dashboard definition, a guide on how to create one, and finalize with social media dashboard templates at the end of the article.

What Is A Social Media Dashboard?

A social media dashboard is an invaluable management tool that is used by professionals, managers, and companies to gather, optimize, and visualize important metrics and data from social channels such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc.

Such dashboards are usually created with a dashboard maker that makes things much more simple and effective since you don’t have to manually update the data or create countless confusing spreadsheets. Now we will take a closer look at how to create a social media dashboard and what important things you should keep in mind.

How To Create A Social Media Dashboard?

To make the most out of your social media dashboards, you need to have an established process before you generate reports and utilize your online data visualization. In that regard, you need to consider certain points that will help you optimize your analysis and create a seamless process in consolidating your data and generating actionable insights. Let’s take a look at this process in more detail.

1. Set your social media goals

To create a comprehensive social network dashboard, you need to establish your goals and objectives. It makes sense to use the SMART methodology to keep it specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely. You need to identify what kind of goals you want to achieve and how to get there with the resources you have. Is your goal to attain a higher number of followers, visits to the website, or increased engagement? If you get into details, you will know what kind of metrics you need to accompany with your analysis.

2. Bring your data in a single, central place

First and foremost, integrating data into a single point of access to create stunning visuals should be on top of your list since you probably need to consolidate information from multiple platforms and create a seamless online data analysis process. That will enable you to quickly access advanced analysis and generate a social media analytics dashboard swiftly and without the need to use traditional means of static reporting such as spreadsheets or presentations.

When connecting your social media channels through a modern dashboard tool, you need to take into account the data integration and connection process. Whereas static spreadsheets can deliver some value in your analysis, they cannot enable you to connect multiple channels at once and visualize data in real-time. With modern tools, you have the opportunity to connect all your social media data in a single place, without the need of setting up complex ETL processes or perform tedious preparations. Especially in the SaaS space, you can simply connect to a remote data warehouse and merge, edit, or add all social networks in one place with the help of data connectors and APIs. That way, you can customize your analysis without restrictions and react to social changes as soon as they happen.

3. Choose the right social KPIs

Once your goals and data are in the right place, you need to start thinking about the metrics, as mentioned earlier. While there are numerous operational metrics as well as strategic ones, you need to think through and choose wisely. What kind of social media KPIs will you choose completely depends on the goals you have established. If you want to focus on advertisements on social media, then metrics such as the CPC and CTR should be included in your dashboard for social media. If, on the other hand, you focus on community management, then “social currencies” such as likes, comments, replies, or shares might be a good starting point.

4. Utilize professional social media dashboard software

Professional software will only help you in saving countless hours of endless analysis that you would, otherwise, have to do manually with traditional spreadsheets, as we mentioned earlier. And while there are many options on the market, only a fraction will provide you with advanced features that will actually bring business value.

By utilizing professional social media dashboard software, you will have the opportunity to automate your dashboards and reports, share them with a few clicks, and access data in real-time, which is extremely critical in a fast-paced environment such as social networks.

5. Finally, start creating

When you have all your goals and information in the right place, your next step involves the creation itself. Here you might want to consider what kind of chart you want to use, whether you need to respect your brand colors, or even optimize for mobile devices. To help you on your way, you can read our extensive guide on how to create a dashboard.

To see our points in practice and real business scenarios, we dedicate our next section to social media analytics dashboard templates, focused on 2 valuable channels: Facebook and LinkedIn.

Social Media Dashboard Templates

It is clear that creating a social media management dashboard requires certain preparation and research, but after you’ve done with the steps we have described above, it’s time to generate a dashboard. That said, here we will present templates that you can use for your own inspiration and analysis.

1. Social media KPI scorecard

As we mentioned how important is to bring all social media data under a single point of access, a social media KPI scorecard is a fantastic example that shows multiple channels and multiple KPIs.

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In the example above, we can see how Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube perform against set goals but let’s dig deeper into the visual. Metrics such as followers, impressions, link clicks, engagement, and CTR are analyzed according to actual performance and target. Continuing the analysis, we can see how the channel performs against set targets, compare it to the previous period, and, in the final row, expression in percentage. A clear overview of the CTR over a 6-month period provides more details about the development and enables us to spot immediately if there are significant spikes.

Such a dashboard gives us the opportunity to consolidate the most important social channels into a single scorecard, enabling us to immediately notice if there are signals that tells us to adjust our strategies or everything is under control.

2. Social media ad dashboard for Facebook

Our second template comes from one of the most popular social networks in the world. With more than 2.70 billion monthly users, this network is oftentimes one of the top channels when creating a social media strategy, especially concerning ads. Facebook advertisers have a demanding task of continuous optimization of campaigns, and here we deliver a social media analytics dashboard template that can help achieve better Facebook results.

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As you can see in our Facebook dashboard above, a quick overview of impressions, reach, frequency, CPC, and the average CTR is shown at the top of this social media marketing dashboard. Below these metrics, you can see a more detailed visualization of each metric, critical for understanding what works and what needs further adjustments. By customizing the time frame, and setting up custom alerts, ad optimization and performance doesn’t need to be tedious anymore.

3. LinkedIn KPI dashboard

Our third social media reporting dashboard shows the business side of networking online. LinkedIn, one of the most prominent networks for developing business contacts, and by reaching over 700 million members, it’s certainly one of the networks that you should keep on your radar.

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This LinkedIn dashboard example above shows essential metrics when it comes to a holistic overview of this social network, including relevant metrics such as the most recent posts, engagement rate, profile views, and social actions. On the right side, you can additionally spot followers by industry and job function as well as weekly social actions that will help you to optimize and upscale your LinkedIn strategy. Such a dashboard is extremely important if you want to tackle deeper into this business-oriented network and provide the most relevant content to your audience to ensure positive social media development.

A Short Summary

We have explained what is a social media dashboard, provided steps and tips on how to create one, and introduced examples that can help you in developing your own social media strategy.

Now it’s your time to shine! Try datapine for a 14-day trial and start creating your own advanced social media dashboards!

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