4 essential social media dashboards for leaders in 2024

Ask any social media manager and they'll tell you that the balancing act of managing multiple accounts, platforms and content can get overwhelming at times.  

That's why a social media dashboard is essential.  

It doesn’t just organize tasks; it sheds light on consumer patterns and reveals rich insights, helping you improve your social media strategy. Plus, it allows you to monitor everything from the performance of your latest posts to the level of audience engagement without switching between multiple screens. 

Would you like to know more about social media dashboards and their use cases? Read on!

Learn More: 9 ways to leverage social media data to drive business growth 

What is a social media dashboard? 

A social media dashboard consolidates vital metrics from your various social media channels, offering you insights ranging from follower trajectories to competitive analysis, all in a unified interface. A well-structured dashboard is visually intuitive, presenting data in a format that allows for swift comprehension and trend recognition. It's also a great resource for gauging market sentiment around your brand. 

The utility of the dashboard hinges on your business objectives and team dynamics. It can provide both a comprehensive overview for strategy alignment and granular details for meticulous analysis. Regular analysis of data from the dashboard not only helps you make informed decisions but also helps refine your overarching social media strategy, ensuring optimal engagement and return on investment (ROI). 

Why a powerful social media dashboard is needed in 2024 

As social media managers, we need to start embracing tools that amplify our capacity to engage, analyze and innovate in the coming year. The social media dashboard is one of those critical tools that can steer your business toward strategic success. Here are a few ways it ensures just that. 

Data overload management: The expected surge in digital data sources means your team will require a centralized dashboard to efficiently distill, interpret and act on vast volumes of information. 

Real-time engagement: People who shop online want their questions answered quickly. To keep up, you will need to employ dashboards that display customer information in real time, allowing your support team to respond to customers immediately. 

Competitive positioning: A social media dashboard gathers and presents data about what's happening on social platforms in one place. You can leverage it to track your competitors' activities — what they post, when they post and how users engage with it. In other words, you can spot the latest industry trends, see what's popular among users and gauge your competitors’ strategies. This level of insight helps you make smarter decisions about what to do on social media to get ahead of the competition. 

ROI optimization: A comprehensive social media dashboard allows you to refine your marketing strategies by tracking the effectiveness of your campaigns across channels. The dashboard highlights which social posts are getting the most engagement and conversions, providing necessary guidance on where to allocate marketing dollars for the best ROI. 

Learn More: How to set social media goals for your business 

Must-have features of a social media dashboard 

A robust social media dashboard has many capabilities and here are some of them.  

Unified social media monitoring: A well-designed dashboard lets you easily collect information from different social media sites like X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube and consolidate it all in one place. This not only makes it easy for you to keep tabs on all your social media accounts but also simplifies the process of adding new social media accounts into the fold as and when needed. 

Post scheduling and campaign management: A capable social media dashboard serves as a centralized control center, enabling you to schedule and coordinate the release of your posts on platforms such as Facebook, X and Instagram, all from a single location. This empowers you to plan your entire week or month in advance, ensuring that your content is consistently published on schedule. Furthermore, it consolidates all your campaign information in one convenient location, so you can manage your marketing efforts as necessary, without any complications. 

Trend tracking and customer sentiment analysis: It's crucial to keep up with trends and regularly check how customers feel about your brand. Sentiment analysis lets you understand whether your customers are satisfied with your brand or products and pinpoints areas needing improvement.  

Let’s say you’re launching a new product. Sentiment analysis allows you to track how well it's received in the market and understand public reaction. By focusing on specific keywords, you can extract insights from customer conversations and mentions of your brand across various platforms. This gives you an immediate understanding of how customers feel about your product, which is invaluable for making strategic decisions. 

Competitive analysis and insights: By examining competitors’ marketing strategies, you can identify gaps and opportunities in your marketing strategy. Further, using insights from competitive analysis, you can fine-tune your content strategy to better appeal to your target audience and stand out from competitors. Ultimately, the combination of audience knowledge and competitive insights allows you to make informed decisions, anticipate market trends and respond strategically to competitive moves. 

Team collaboration and project management: Behind every successful campaign is a well-coordinated team. A social media dashboard that enables collaboration — whether through communication, task assignment or progress monitoring — is incredibly valuable, especially when there are multiple projects happening simultaneously. A good dashboard ensures that the entire team is aware of the plan, stays on track, and remains up-to-date, which helps everything run smoothly. 

In-depth reporting: To truly understand the impact of your marketing efforts, it's important to review the outcomes. This is where effective reporting tools are essential. Opt for a dashboard that simplifies gathering data from different platforms, allowing you to create tailored reports that clearly present the information you need. Additionally, the dashboard should be user-friendly, enabling you to easily share these reports and insights with your team or clients, streamlining communication and collaboration. 

4 types of social media dashboard for all your marketing needs 

Here are four kinds of social media dashboards that stand out for their utility and can help marketing leaders such as yourself drive successful campaigns: 

Awareness dashboard 

An awareness dashboard tells you how many people are noticing and engaging with your brand online by tracking new followers and engagement metrics such as likes, comments and shares. This provides valuable insights into your brand's growing popularity and reach. A constant flow of this data is crucial to understanding how your brand is connecting with audiences over time. 

Why it's valuable: It gives you an idea of how familiar your target audience is with your brand and the extent of their interactions across various social platforms. 

Key metrics: This dashboard focuses on metrics like follower growth, impressions, reach, mentions, engagement and link clicks. 

Supported platforms: You can pull brand awarness data from popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and LinkedIn. 

Conversion dashboard  

A conversion dashboard gives you a focused view of how your social media activities are translating into tangible business outcomes. It tracks the journey of your audience from their initial engagement with your social media posts to their visits to your blog or website. Your audience’s journey is a strong indicator of their interest toward your brand. While tracking these user actions, the dashboard lets you know if your posts are effective at getting people closer to buying something from you. 

Why it's valuable: It shows you how many people are going from your social media pages to your website. 

Key metrics: This dashboard zeroes in on metrics like link clicks, user profile clicks and interactions from CTA buttons such as calls, texts and email clicks. 

Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X and LinkedIn.  

Engagement dashboard 

An engagement dashboard provides key insights into how people interact with your brand on social media, going beyond mere content views. It tracks and measures likes, comments, and shares, giving you an overview of the level of active engagement your social media posts get. 

Why it's valuable: It shows you how and how often your audience interacts with your posts. 

Key metrics: It gives you insights into overall engagement, comments, replies, likes, reactions, shares, photo views, engagement by media type and standout posts. 

Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and LinkedIn.  

Audience growth dashboard  

An audience growth dashboard is designed to show the growth of your social media followers. It helps you see if your posts are reaching a larger audience and lets you know if you’re steadily acquiring new followers. 

Why it's valuable: It sheds light on how your audience is growing, helping you understand the impact of your social media presence. 

Key metrics: This dashboard zeroes in on aspects like follower count, follower evolution, impressions on pages and profiles, reach of your pages and profiles, and the demographics of newly acquired or churned followers. 

Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok and LinkedIn.  

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Steps to build your own social media dashboard  

Knowing how to build a social media dashboard is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your campaigns. And here’s how to build — and use — a social dashboard that can support your social media campaign objectives seamlessly.  

Step 1: Define your objectives  

Regardless of where you work — B2B or B2C company, it's essential to be clear about your objectives before you set out to measure the results. Consider using the SMART framework to decide your objectives.  

• Specific 

• Measureable 

• Achievable 

• Relevant 

• Time-bound 

Additionally, use industry benchmarks to shape your goals. To do this effectively, first research and identify standard benchmarks within your industry. These benchmarks could be average growth rates, engagement levels or customer retention rates specific to your sector. Based on these benchmarks, decide on goals that are both challenging but still achievable.   For instance, instead of just aiming to get “more social media followers,” set a realistic and attainable goal of gaining 5% more Instagram followers every month. This way, you’ll be able to ensure that your targets are not only ambitious but also fit well with market expectations.  

Step 2: Select the right metrics and KPIs  

To track your social media progress effectively, using the right metrics and KPIs (key performance indicators) is crucial. These should reflect and resonate with the your social media goals and objectives. For instance, if your objective revolves around amplifying your Instagram presence, your primary metric has to be your Instagram follower count.   

However, delving deeper into your goals can reveal even more granular details. For example, instead of just looking at the total number of followers, it's beneficial to monitor the rate at which your follower count is growing. The follower growth rate provides insights into the effectiveness of your social media strategies.    

Additionally, if your objective is to amplify engagement levels, then you should invest in social listening. AI-powered social listening tools help you understand the emotions of your customers via their social media mentions and interactions. For deeper insights, examine a few critical aspects of engagement like how often people click the CTA on your post or the number of comments you get on your posts. Doing this gives you a complete picture of your social media efforts.  

Step 3: Establish your data monitoring framework  

A well-designed social media analytics dashboard makes it easier to monitor your campaign's success across various digital platforms. By providing detailed insights, it brings clarity as to which aspects of your strategy are effective and which need improvement. Such a dashboard can be a valuable asset for social media teams of any size and experience level, and it's especially beneficial for those working with limited budgets. Investing in a dashboard that offers thorough analytics is a smart move, as it gives you the insights needed to enhance your social media efforts.  

How to set social media goals for your business

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Step 4: Opt for a comprehensive social media management platform  

Using a single and integrated social media management tool can transform how you handle your online presence. It combines content planning and data analysis in one solution, saving you the hassle of using multiple tools for different tasks. This not only makes your work more efficient but also provides clearer insights. You get easy-to-understand reports showing your campaign’s progress and its impact over time, helping you make better-informed decisions quickly and effectively.  

Stay 5: Stay updated with regular check-ins 

Make sure to regularly check how your social media is doing against the goals you've set. If your goals are set on a monthly basis, then it's a good idea to review the progress at the end of each month. However, if you're responsible for making key business decisions, a more frequent check, say weekly or even daily, might be necessary. This way you can quickly adapt to changes, grab new opportunities, or tackle any problems, ensuring that your brand remains competitive. 

Gets tons of actionable insights from Sprinklr’s social media reporting dashboards 

When you're working to boost your brand on social media it's crucial to have the right insights. This is where an advanced reporting dashboard like Sprinklr's becomes a game-changer. It simplifies complex data from various social media channels into reports that are both comprehensive and easy to understand. This clarity is the secret sauce — it helps your team get a better grip on social media trends and use these insights to enhance your brand's image. 

Additionally, these dashboards are AI-powered, which means they can handle vast amounts of data from over 30 digital channels quickly and efficiently. This speed not only makes the social media reporting process faster but also gives your team more time for strategic planning. With less time spent on number-crunching there’s more room for developing innovative strategies to elevate your brand's online presence. Harnessing the power of such social media dashboards can transform the way your brand engages with its audience, ensuring that every decision is backed by data-driven insights.