Nevertheless, although social media channels provide a vast amount of data, companies often struggle to define comprehensive and value-driven social media dashboards.
Designing A Social Media Dashboard Isn’t That Trivial
To be frank: Designing a social media dashboard (and any other kind of dashboard) isn’t that trivial. It requires experience, design skills, and a comprehensive understanding of goals, metrics, and KPIs.
However, the biggest problem we’ve observed in projects with companies of all sizes is different. Usually, they have the needed IT skills, but they lack some inspiration. Inspiration how a comprehensive social media dashboard can look and which KPIs to calculate.
Let’s Fuel Your Inspiration
Since you are reading this blog post, you are probably facing the same issue. That’s precisely why we put together this post. We wanted to create a source for everyone that seeks inspiration.
Therefore, we focused on Twitter as a social media channel. Nonetheless, the concept also works for other social media channels. However, some Key Performance Indicators are —of course— tailored to Twitter.
Social Media Dashboards — Real-Time Is Key
We want to emphasize one crucial aspect before we dig into the five stunning social media dashboard details. Regardless of the design and the KPIs you are choosing for your dashboard, make sure to provide real-time data. Social media—more than any other topic— is real-time driven. Therefore, it is vital to provide actual values and information!
Social Media Dashboard Example 1 — Twitter Monitor
We created a social media dashboard that holds both a perfect overview and the exact detail of the Twitter Monitor.
The large bubble chart gives you a perfect overview of your presence on Twitter. The size of the bubbles indicates how often your company was mentioned. Moreover, the color of the bubble indicates if the majority of mentions were either positive, negative, or neutral.
Additionally, text boxes directly show you the content of essential tweets about your company. On top of that, the dashboard provides a comprehensive overview of the most crucial social media KPIs:
- Number of Tweets — Clustered according to tweets, retweets, replies, and quotes
- Response Quota (compared to the previous day)
- Response Time (compared to a target value)
- Number of followers (compared to the previous day)
- Engagement Rate (compared to the previous day)
- Social Reach (compared to the previous day)
Why’s That Dashboard So Important?
We consider this social media dashboard one of the most important because it combines details with a comprehensive overview. First, you get a perfect picture of the most critical KPIs and how your social media activities are performing today. Second, you get the details about your followers and what the world is saying about you.
Want to know more about KPI Design? Here’s where to start!
Social Media Dashboard Example 2 — Spotlight On Topics
I’m a big fan of the “Topics Dashboard.” Simply because it provides you with many insights about your social media performance — for example, on Twitter.
However, it’s worth mentioning that this dashboard requires some effort to set up the needed technical infrastructure.
The idea behind it: In the first step, you define topics relevant to your business. That can be everything. The example below reflects a social media dashboard we set up for an airline. Therefore, we choose the following items:
- Product
- Brand
- Network
- Operations
However, it’s totally up to you and your business to select meaningful topics. In a second step, you have to set up a dictionary that defines words or phrases that appear in Tweets or other posts. Finally, you have to assign each word/phrase to a topic.
As a result, you can analyze social media posts in a very particular way. For example, we came up with the following details for the social media dashboard example shown here.
KPIs on the left side:
- Tweets — Number of Tweets for each topic
- Engagement — Engagement for each topic
- Social Reach — The number of people you reached with the different topics
Bubble Chart
The bubble chart might look a bit complicated at first sight. However, once you’ve understood the logic, it provides massive value.
First of all, we show the social reach and engagement rate on the x/y axis. The size of the bubble represents the number of tweets for a specific topic. Additionally, the gradient bubble shows a comparison value — for example, the last day.
Bar Charts
Finally, the bar chart provides a more detailed view of a specific period. In our example, we show the development of each topic during the last 30 minutes. Of course, this depends on your business and the number of tweets.
Why’s That Dashboard So Important?
We consider this social media dashboard as super-essential because it digs deeper into —very specific— details. So instead of showing high-level numbers only, you can analyze the topics that matter to your business.
Social Media Dashboard Example 3 — Benchmark
Knowing your company’s social media performance is one thing. Knowing how your competitors are performing another. Combining these two aspects is super-vital. That’s precisely why our third social media dashboard example focuses on a holistic benchmark view.
Therefore, we put together the four most important KPIs. Subsequently, we display the KPIs not only for one company but for a set of competitors. In this context, we decided to go for the following KPIs:
- Tweets
- Follower
- Engagement
- Social Reach
Additionally, we focused on comprehensive color highlighting. Charts colored in green indicate an improvement over the last 30 days. Widgets colored in red show the KPI has decreased during the previous 30 days.
Why’s That Dashboard So Important?
I think there’s no lengthy explanation needed why this social media dashboard is super important. I think it provides an easy-to-understand overview of your and your competitors’ performance.
Want to know more about KPI Design? Here’s where to start!
Social Media Dashboard Example 4 — Media
Putting out various content forms is exceptionally crucial for companies — especially on social media. However, depending on your business, industry, or clients, some media types might perform better than others. Of course, that does not mean that you should solely focus on your “homerun-media.” Nevertheless, knowing how media types perform helps define the correct type when putting out new content.
With the below social media dashboard example, we went for four different media types:
- Video
- Photo
- GIF
- Text
Again, you and your social media strategy are up to you to add other media types or have a more specific cluster. The setup of the social media dashboard is similar to example number 2.
KPIs on the left side
We show the most important KPIs, clustered according to the defined media types:
- Tweets
- Engagement
- Social Reach
Bubble Chart
Again, we show the social reach and engagement rate for the corresponding media types on the x/y axis. Additionally, the size of the bubble represents the number of tweets that have been published. On top of that, the gradient bubble shows a comparison value of the media type (for example, last day, week, etc.).
Why’s That Dashboard So Important?
As mentioned above, the dashboard helps you to determine how different content types work. Accordingly, you can incorporate that into future decisions.
Social Media Dashboard Example 5 — Hashtags
With the last social media dashboard example, we focus on hashtags. Since hashtags are slightly different, we had to utilize a specific approach.
The bar chart on the left side shows the top 15 hashtags used in tweets, retweets, or mentions. Since the usage intensity of different hashtags widely differs quite often, we incorporated a color scheme.
Duplicate accounts for the bubble chart where we again focused on social reach and engagement concerning different hashtags.
Besides visualizing current tweets, we also incorporated a sentiment analysis on the right side of the dashboard.
Why’s That Dashboard So Important?
Hashtags are a very dynamic yet essential aspect of social media. Therefore, we consider it highly crucial to have a close eye on that aspect.
What Do You Think?
Always happy to receive your feedback and thoughts. Just hit me up on Twitter or get in touch on LinkedIn.
