Social media, which has over 4.6 billion users globally, allows advertisers to reach a wider audience and interact with more potential clients. However, it is not just about posting content on social media; marketers should be able to also monitor the analytics to see how effective their strategies are. This is where a social media dashboard comes in.
Even though social media platforms like Twitter have Twitter Analytics to track your activities, businesses require sophisticated social media analytics to monitor their competitors, analyze their performance, and make data-driven decisions.
In this post, I will go over the top 10 social media analytics to track your social media dashboard.
Key Points:
- A social media dashboard consolidates key social media data from various networks, allowing businesses to assess campaign effectiveness and customer engagement.
- It facilitates decision-making with real-time data and provides a competitive advantage through comprehensive insights.
- Using a social media analytics dashboard saves time by eliminating the need for manual data compilation from different sources.
- Tools like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and Rival IQ offer different features for businesses to monitor performance, competitor activity, and audience engagement.
- Each dashboard should be tailored to specific audiences and goals, such as tracking brand recognition, measuring campaign effectiveness, or monitoring competitor performance.
What Is A Social Media Dashboard?
A social media dashboard is a platform that collects your vital social media data from several social media networks, allowing you to easily assess the effectiveness of your campaigns, customer service, and community involvement. Social media dashboards provide you the ability to analyze data, refine your approach, prove your worth, and have an impact on choices.
Furthermore, the best social media dashboards will let you manage ad campaigns and track trending content in addition to monitoring popular content. This improves your social media marketing and helps you understand your overall social media performance.
Benefits of A Social Media Analytics Dashboard
Dashboards give teams an overview of social interactions and enable them to react and interact with trends and client demands proactively. Here are the benefits of a strategic social media analytics dashboard for you.
#1. It Makes Decision-making Easier.
A social media dashboard allows you to instantly make well-informed decisions by integrating real-time data from several social media sites. This allows you to adapt your tactics to real-time market changes and customer feedback.
#2. Gain A Competitive Advantage
Dashboards provide you with a more thorough understanding of both your own and your competitor’s performance, with features like sentiment tracking and competitive analysis. This allows you to keep ahead of the competition and improve your social media marketing tactics.
#3. It Offers Detailed Insights
You’ll be able to monitor your development and pinpoint areas that require work in this manner. For instance, you can take action to address a rapid decline in your engagement rate.
#4. Get A Better Understanding Of Your Audience
Understanding your target audience is simpler when you use social media analytics tools. You can gain insight into the opinions and behavior of your audience by knowing their demographics, hobbies, and even the times when they are most active.
With the use of this information, you can produce content that interests them and schedule its release for peak interaction.
Read Also: Best Strategies for Captivating Your Audience with Social Media Storytelling (+ Examples)
#5. Social Media Analytics Dashboard Makes It Easy To Make Data-Driven Decisions
This implies that you can use facts rather than assumptions to inform your decisions. You can then be certain of the kind of content that your audience likes, and to increase engagement, you can then produce more of that content.
#6. It Saves Time
You can save time by using social media analytics tools instead of laboriously compiling data manually from many sources. You can easily track all of your social media data in one location with the help of these tools. In this manner, you may produce more excellent material while saving time.
#7. Enhanced Return on Investment
Dashboards help organizations allocate resources to increase return on investment by highlighting the most effective campaigns so you can invest in them.
How To Build A Social Media Dashboard?
Here’s how to create a social media marketing dashboard:
#1. Define Your Objectives.
The process of creating a dashboard begins with defining your goals. Choose the indicators that matter most for your social media marketing. The following are some typical media metrics to monitor: impressions, conversion rate, reach, and engagement rate.
Read Also: How to Define and Set Digital Marketing Objectives for Your Brand(+Examples)
#2. Select the Appropriate Platform
The market is filled with several social media analytics tools. Select a solution that works with your social media accounts and can give you the required metrics.
#3. Decide Which KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) To Use.
Choose the KPIs that will enable you to assess your social media campaign’s effectiveness. Note that your KPIs should be relevant, quantifiable, and particular in addition to matching your goals.
Read Also: PR KPIs: Top 10 PR KPIs Every Comms Pro Needs to Track in 2024
#4. Design your dashboard.
Design a dashboard that is simple to use and shows your results clearly and concisely. Selecting the appropriate visualizations will improve your understanding of your data.
#5. Link to Your Social Media Platforms
To ensure that your dashboard is updated, link your social media accounts to your analytics platform and automate data collection.
#6. Test and Adjust Your Dashboard
After testing it, make necessary adjustments based on input from stakeholders or your team. Ensure that your dashboard offers insights that can be put to use and are simple to comprehend.
Top 10 Examples Of Social Media Dashboard Analytics Tools
#1. Hootsuite
Ideal for: Large marketing teams, small-to-medium-sized business social media managers, and business owners that oversee their own social media accounts.
Price: $99 per month
Hootsuite is comparable to social media analytics that offers access to metrics from X (previously Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn in one convenient location.
You may eliminate the need to monitor each social media network separately by using Hootsuite, which provides an overall view of all your activities. In addition to receiving actionable insights on the most popular posts, hashtags, and content formats in your niche, you can track up to 20 competitors per network and obtain a clear picture of your strengths and weaknesses.
Just type the name of a competitor into the search bar and select the correct profile from the dropdown list to see how they are faring compared to you.
It saves time by simplifying the process of comparing outcomes from several social media platforms, such as:
Social media post metrics:
- Clicks
- Comments
- Reach
- Engagement rate
- Impressions
- Shares
- Saves
- Video views
- Video reach
#2. Sprout Social
Source: Sprout Social
Ideal for: Marketing teams at larger organizations
Price: Starting at $199/month
Sprout Social is a social media analytics tool that assists you in organizing and carrying out your social media strategy because it provides analytics for all of the main social media networks.
Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout has a feature-rich analytics dashboard that lets you know everything about your sponsored and organic posts and determines the optimal times to publish content. Sprout Dashboard also makes it simple to download and white-label social media reports.
Although Hootsuite offers more features and integrations, Sprout is significantly more expensive.
#3. Later
Source: Later
Ideal for: Social media managers at small- to medium-sized businesses, business owners who oversee their own social media accounts
Price: Starting at $25/month
Later is best for smaller brands and creators that prefer to see and assess social media content before posting. Later can assist you in tracking the effectiveness of your social media posts and scheduling posts at the best times.
#4. Rival IQ
Source: Rival IQ
Ideal for: Social media managers
Price: From $239 per month
Rival IQ allows social media administrators to become data scientists. It offers major social media sites’ analytical data, notifications, and personalized reports.
With Rival IQ’s comprehensive reports, performing a competition study or a thorough social media audit is simple. Then, use fully editable dashboards, charts, and images to convey your results to your marketing team and stakeholders.
Additionally, Rival IQ’s extensive social media post statistics enable you to determine which posts are more effective on each platform and why. It allows you to examine the social media profiles of your rivals.
#5. Brandwatch
Source: Brandwatch
Ideal for: Social media marketers that prioritize engagement and brand monitoring, as well as PR and communications teams
Price: Pricing is available on request.
Brandwatch provides an effective set of tools that let you monitor social share of voice and brand reputation in addition to tracking and analyzing your social media accounts.
With the use of AI techniques, Brandwatch Consumer Research extracts data and trends from over 1.4 trillion postings that are pertinent to your organization. You can also activate email alerts to notify you when sentiment or conversion volume changes.
Free Social Media Analytics Tools
#6. Google Analytics
Source: Google
Ideal for: Social media experts
Google Analytics is among the best free resources for gathering visitor data for your website. It’s a great tool for social media marketers who wish to increase website traffic.
Even though it’s not a stand-alone tool for social media analytics, you can use it to:
- Check out the social media sites that bring in the most traffic.
- Examine which content generates the most leads and visitors.
- Identify your target with the use of demographic data.
- Determine how much your social media campaigns are worth.
You’ll be able to plan and maximize the impact of your social media initiatives with the help of these data points.
#7. Meta Business Suite Insights
Source: Meta Business Suite
Available to: Facebook Pages and Instagram professional accounts
Meta Business Suite allows you to view side-by-side account, platform, and post-level metrics for Facebook and Instagram on the Meta Business Suite’s Insights page. Along with tracking your ad account cost, you can also investigate the demographics of your target audience.
#8. Instagram Insights
Source: Instagram
Available to: Business and creator accounts
The in-app analytics feature on Instagram provides data for measures like reach and engagement at the account and post levels. You may monitor patterns in the acquisition of new followers and determine the various ways in which they engage with your material.
Along with tracking the effectiveness of your Instagram Reels and Stories, you can also discover more about the demographics of your Instagram following.
#9. TikTok Analytics
Source: TikTok
Available to: TikTok business accounts
TikTok’s native analytics tool divides your metrics into three categories: analytics for content performance, follower growth and demographics, and overview data. The TikTok analytics tool includes video metrics, such as views, likes, comments, and shares, as well as information about your profile and followers.
#10. X Analytics
Source: X
Available to: All users of X (formerly Twitter)
X analytics lets you know which other X users have the greatest potential to spread the word about your content and how well your sponsored and organic X posts are performing.
It offers monthly highlights, such as top posts and top followers. It’s a handy tool for seeing a quick overview of your top-performing content and finding possible brand ambassadors or influencers.
What Insights Should Your Social Media Dashboard Software Include?
Each data dashboard has a distinct purpose, ranging from monitoring brand recognition to centralizing marketing analytics. Your specific use cases should guide the development of your social media dashboards. However, the fundamental purpose of every dashboard is to shine a light on why your brand succeeded or failed in achieving a particular objective.
You can choose which information to include in your dashboard by using the following six questions as a guide:
- What is this dashboard intended to achieve?
- Which measures are most important for reaching this objective?
- Who is the audience?
- Which channels require measurements? (For instance, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook)
- How long does it take to measure change?
- How do we stack up against rivals?
In the end, you ought to have several social media dashboards for various audiences and objectives. With the help of the tools listed above, you can access and create personalized social media dashboards, which will save you time and enable you to develop dashboards that are ready for various business segments.
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