Social Media Dashboard

What is a social media dashboard exactly? Let’s break it down.

A dashboard is a high-level decision support tool that provides comprehensive data-driven information with sufficient supporting detail. It enables users to understand the overall situation and navigate towards a goal. The display should be concise but have enough detail that the user to make inferences, gain insight, prioritize tasks, and allocate resources.

Social media marketing is the use of social networks like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to distribute messages in order to achieve a goal. Common goals include creating awareness and making a conversion. A conversion, for example, can be related to sales transaction, brand awareness, or lead generation goals.

So, a social media dashboard is a visual display of all the key information a social media marketer needs to gain perspective on campaign performance in order to make decisions that optimize results.

With that said, a well designed dashboard would include information that helped optimize conversion. Optimizing conversions would include targeting the right audience, driving traffic to a landing page, and providing a landing page that produced the best conversion rates. Thus, the social media dashboard would include the following components:

Distribution – this is the process of sending messages to, engaging with, and growing the size of the marketer’s audience. Optimizing this process means spending less time on ineffective marketing message and social networks, and reallocating that effort to more promising activity or networks. For example, if 80% time was spent marketing on Facebook, but only 5% of all social conversions came the Facebook audience, yet only 10% of resources were spent on Twitter but that audience accounted for 15% of all social conversions, then these dashboard data points would provide the social manager with insight that could be used to adjust tactics after further examination.

o Number of social networks being utilized (are all channels being leveraged, why not?)

o Twitter: #Tweets, #Followers, #Following, #

o Facebook Fan Page: #Fans, #New Fans, #Wall Posts, etc.

o YouTube: #Video Views, # Channel Subscribers, etc..

Channel Metrics – monitoring traffic metrics can give good clues about targeting, message effectiveness and landing page effectiveness. If messages are well targeted and landing pages are designed, visitors would likely stay a while and/or make a conversion. Traffic metrics could reveal the probability of an eventual conversion. These are important metrics to follow: Google Analytics provides these metrics free, and Alexa uses them, in part, to rank websites. Social media dashboards should include the following traffic metrics:

o Visits by Social Network

o Time On Site by Social Network

o Unique Page Views by Social Network

o Bounce Rate by Social Network

Non-Social Metrics – social media metrics from non-social sources traffic could be compared to traffic from organic and pay-per-click traffic to help decide the incremental value and ROI of social media marketings:

o Visits

o Time On Site

o Unique Page Views

o Bounce Rate

In summary, a social media dashboard gives perspective on the entire social media campaign. There are so many moving parts and little ‘visibility’ in social media marketing. The social media dashboard is like having a GPS system – it gives perspective, supports decisions, optimizes results, and provides visibility.