Why You Need a Social Media Dashboard

Whether you’re a startup or a multi million-dollar enterprise, you know you need to be active on social media to reach and engage with your customers. Social media drives ecommerce sales and customer experiences. Using a social media dashboard can help your business in a number of ways.

 

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Streamline Your Social Activity

Keeping up with multiple social networks is time-consuming, and can easily overwhelm. With a centralized dashboard, all the activity from your social networks goes to one place. No more hassle of logging in and out of Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram as you try to figure out how well your social strategy is working – or not.

With widgets, it’s easy to see a variety of metrics, including:

• Likes
• Impressions
• Followers/Unfollowers
• Klout score
• Other metrics as desired

Find out what’s going on with a bird’s eye view of your social activity, so you can watch for patterns, and adjust your strategy as needed.

Easily See What’s Popular with Your Audience

Using your dashboard, you can see which status updates/posts/tweets resonated the most with your audience. Find out more about the engagement, whether through likes, shares, comments, or retweets.

Once you know the kind of content your audience responds to, you can focus on creating more of it to share, or curating similar content from other publishers.

Monitor Your Brand Reputation

Knowing what people are saying about your brand on social media is an important part of managing your online reputation, and knowing where you stand with your customers.

If you see negativity, don’t panic. Instead, publicly address the issue with a request for the person to email you, and take the issue to a private forum. This way, anyone else who sees the issue will at least see that you are responsive.

Measure Where Your Sales Originate

According to Shopify’s Social Commerce Infographic:

“Facebook dominates as a source of social traffic and sales. Nearly two thirds of all social media visits to Shopify stores come from Facebook. Plus, an average of 85% of all ecommerce orders from social media come from Facebook.”

When you monitor your social media activities using a social media dashboard, your business will be able to measure which specific types of social posts generate the most sales. Use that information to increase conversions from social networks.

Shopify’s statistics also indicated that the highest average order value came from Polyvore, so consider adding that to your regular mix if you sell products.

Monitor Your Competition

Much like knowing what’s going on with your own brand reputation, it’s a good idea to keep up with what your competition is doing. This way, you know what you need to do to differentiate yourself from them and position your brand as the better alternative.

Setting Up Your Social Dashboard

There are several ways to configure your social dashboard, but the beauty is the ability to customize it to your liking. If there are certain social networks, like LinkedIn or Pinterest, that you don’t use for your business, then obviously you don’t need to create a dashboard with widgets for those networks.

Setup your dashboard in accordance with the networks you’re most active on or most want to improve, and then focus on metrics you want to monitor. Change things around as you accomplish your social media goals, but don’t forget to keep an eye on your brand reputation throughout the entire process.

If you see things changing negatively, look at the way you’ve been posting and the types of content you’ve been posting. Make adjustments a little at a time and watch for the positive uptick to come back.

Focusing your social media analysis on a dashboard simplifies the overall process, allowing you to spend less time trying to pull actionable insights out of the data. This way, you can spend more time taking action to improve your strategy, boosting your following and engagement, and eventually your profits.