Social media dashboards help small business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketing pros manage social media campaigns and interactions because they sync all social media accounts in one place. These dashboards also measure all of your social media analytics and aggregates the data so you don’t have to click around to get an understanding of your social media presence.
The top benefits of using a social media dashboard are productivity, tracking and analytics, and scheduling. It’s pretty easy to get distracted on social media when reviewing your activity, reaching out to customers, and putting together posts. An hour after signing into Facebook, you find yourself watching kitten videos on a friend’s page without having done anything for your business. Think of your social media dashboard as a blinder, keeping you focused.
In addition to changing how you engage with social media, these dashboards also allow you to engage with your followers even when you’re too busy to do so live. Social media dashboards allow users to schedule posts for any time and day (although there are still best business practices outlining the optimal posting times) from one convenient place without having to hop from site to site, or app to app.
This tool will not only help you track your analytics and target customers, but also your competition. Social media dashboards let you see who is talking about your competitors and what they are saying so you know how you measure up and change your social media plan accordingly.
There are different social media management products designed for a variety of users with varying technical skillsets and budgets (including free). Hootsuite is a very popular social media dashboard with 13 language options for its 6 million users. Hootsuite has a great dashboard layout in which your social media accounts appear in columns, “streams,” side by side.
Sprout Social is another popular option that helps users take advantage of data. Sprout Social offers social media monitoring via brand keywords that lets you know when someone is talking about you without using the @ tag. You can also expand your contact base by using the Discover feature to follow those who are following you.
There are many options out there so take your time in finding what is best for your business. Each dashboard has its own user interface and you may like the look and feel of one more than another. Intuitive software is fantastic, but people have different sensibilities and different intuition. You can also recruit the skills and knowledge of social media and digital marketing professionals to help you optimize your time online.
