Here’s a brief survey of what social media dashboards can manage and reveal to impress both your target audiences and the people in the front office, and also to create ROI. For every element listed below, remember to be flexible and adjust to keep up with the ever-changing world of social media.
Plan: Everything you do on social media should be part of an overarching business strategy that benefits your KPIs, aligns with your company’s broader marketing strategy, and supports a specific goal for each channel you use. You’ll need to do some audience research and customer targeting, since each social network has a unique following that needs to be addressed differently. Along with differentiation by platform, many social media forum don’t last very long. For example, tweets live for about 18 minutes. While LinkedIn has 450 million users, less than a quarter of those users (100 million) access the site on a regular basis. That’s still an impressive number of users, but it’s important to have a sense of these kinds of statistics when it comes to SMM planning. There’s help on that front: services like Statista (a statistics portal) offer free data about social media to help you think about platform use specific to your industry and target audience.
Schedule: Only a few social networks give you the ability to schedule content, and it can be time-consuming to open each account and manually schedule every post. Since platforms are functioning in real-time and you can’t be online all day long, scheduling is a smart way to be virtually present.
Dashboards can make your timing more strategic. Ideal timing depends on your audience and what you’re sharing. You’ll want to identify the time(s) and day(s) when your community is present so that you target them when they can pay attention to and potentially share your posts. It’s a balancing game: you want to schedule posts for times when they’re very active, but not so active that your message could be lost among the noise. Experiment with different times of day until you determine which times are optimal. Tools like Followerwonk or Facebook Insights can help. To make sure you’re content is timely, pay attention to industry happenings, news, and major events that may impact the predilections of your community.
Once you’ve collected data, use the information to create an editorial calendar. This may include channel goals, frequency and times to post, content types that make an impression, messaging specifics, and metrics in tune with your KPIs. These elements all work together to organize your promotional schedule(s) across multiple networks. Monitoring engagement will help establish optimal days and times to publish posts for your target audience. While having a calendar will provide structure and deadlines, you also want to post during a breaking news event or when there’s something that merits a retweet. You can also archive successful content on your calendar, and then reuse it if it’s evergreen.
Enable Social Listening: Social media monitoring allows you to gain powerful insight into your customers, competitors, and industry influencers. To take full advantage of social media listening, spread monitoring across several social media channels, and remain vigilant to pursue new opportunities. Gaining these insights takes time. There are two areas to monitor: competition (so you can keep tabs on your competitors), and conversations about your brand.
Streamline: Dashboards can help you prevent excessive browsing on social media sites you monitor. If you find yourself getting sidetracked on social media and wasting time, a dashboard will save you time and add rigor to your practice rather than being lured in by a particular platform.
Content Management: To add content that holds meaning for your target audience, a dashboard is a fantastic tool. One of the most useful features is that a dashboard can add content automatically. Of course, content still needs to be written, but you can write it ahead of time and go vertical as well as horizontal.
When customers and prospects check out your posts, they want information about your organization’s niche, but remember to think about their related interests. For example, if you sell pet food, it’s likely that your customers also have a strong interest in animal protection or animal psychology. Make your way into these communities to increase your online audience.
Curate: Finding, organizing, annotating, and sharing digital content on a specific topic that your target market cares about is also a great strategy. Johnson says that for the Sounders marketing team, curation is a major activity that helps move Sounder campaigns forward, and is a great way to support your overall content strategy, publish consistently, and track of useful information sources. Expert opinion varies, but a content mix that is 60 percent curated, 30 percent owned, and 10 percent promotional is a good proportion to test. One of the best things about curated content is that it’s not overly self-promotional and it demonstrates that you know and understand your audience, which is (part of) what it takes to turn them into raving fans.
Collaborate: One of the most valuable aspects of a social media dashboard is the ability to collaborate with team members. It helps to ensure that everyone is working in a timely manner toward a goal and that multiple social media teams and profiles are in sync. Most dashboard tools will allow you and your team members to collaborate, assign roles and duties, and allocate social media tasks to team members to ensure accountability, which is especially helpful if teams work remotely.
Brand Building: You can think about promoting brand engagement two ways, at two levels. The first level is about responding to user mentions, queries, and comments. At this first stage, community expansion is critical, which means responding to everyone who engages with you. (Initially, it should be fairly manageable to react quickly.) Information, such as search queries and conversations from the first level of engagement should then feed into a data-driven content strategy (the second level). Here, you should collect data on how your audience reacts to this next-level content and engages with it, and consider all feedback to evaluate your tactics. You might rethink timing updates, format, sentence structure, social media platforms, or media that you share.
“Social Media is definitely about brand, but it’s no longer just about ‘the promises you keep’ as revenue coach Kristin Zhivago stated long ago,” said Sterne. “These days, and particularly in social media, it’s more complicated because your brand is so entwined with personality. The way you communicate must be carefully managed with specific policy and instruction about voice and tone. Whoever gets to the keyboard needs to know the voice to use and what can be said. Being strategic is the key to success and measurement.”
Johnson concurs, and said that while multiple marketing staff and team members curate and contribute content to a central content bank, everything posted on the Seattle Sounders’ accounts is carefully vetted for brand consistency and with an eye to ROI.