In today’s digital age, every brand is establishing its presence online and connecting with its audience through social media. However, this also means that any brand can be quickly displaced if they fail to keep up with the speed of online. To stay ahead of the game, it’s crucial to have social media dashboards that provide accessible social media monitoring.
This article will explore how to stay current in the present marketing landscape using social media dashboards. We’ll also explore the following:
- Why use Social Media Dashboards?
- How to Choose the Right Social Media Dashboard
- Comparison of Top Social Media Dashboard Solutions
- Benefits of Using Social Media Dashboards
- The Future of Social Media Dashboards
Why use Social Media Dashboards?
Social media dashboards are a must-have tool for organizations and people that wish to monitor and manage their social media presence efficiently. They help you strengthen your presence, engage with your audience, and keep ahead of the competition.
We’ll get into the benefits of using this tool briefly, but first, let’s look at some criteria for selecting a social media dashboard that works for you.
How to choose the right social media dashboard
Selecting the most suitable social media dashboard for your business can be challenging as numerous tools are available in the market, and differentiating between them can be overwhelming. Furthermore, some tools make exaggerated promises that they cannot fulfill. Therefore, brands must conduct proper research before subscribing to a social media dashboard to avoid using an inadequate tool. To assist in this process, consider the following factors:
Features
When selecting a social media dashboard, seek features that will allow you to manage your social media accounts successfully. The following are some aspects to consider:
- Real-time monitoring: Using a social media dashboard with real-time monitoring features, you can keep track of your social media accounts and respond to comments or messages as soon as they appear. This feature is especially beneficial if you have a significant social media following or your business is frequently discussed.
- Scheduling: A scheduling tool allows you to prepare your social media posts ahead of time and have them automatically published at a predetermined period. This tool can save you a lot of time and effort while ensuring your content is constantly posted at the appropriate time.
- Analytics and reporting: A social media dashboard with analytics and reporting capabilities can assist you in tracking the performance of your social media accounts. This data is critical for knowing what is and isn’t working, and it can help you change your social media approach accordingly.
- Collaboration tools: If a team manages your social media accounts, look for a dashboard with collaboration options, such as assigning tasks or collaborating on social media posts. This tool can aid in streamlining your social media administration and ensure everyone is on the same page.
Integration Capabilities
Choosing a social media dashboard that seamlessly integrates with your brand’s social media networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, is essential. Additionally, having a dashboard that can search and analyze news, blogs, research papers, forums, reviews, and other sources can provide valuable insights. Including your own company data set is also crucial to consider.
Ease of Use
When selecting a social media dashboard, consider the platform’s usability and user interface. Here are some considerations:
- Time-saving and user-friendly: A social media dashboard with an intuitive layout will help you manage your social media accounts more effectively. This is essential for brands with numerous accounts.
- Accessibility: A dashboard with a clear and straightforward style can help improve the platform’s accessibility for users with disabilities, such as visual impairments.
- Efficient navigation: A well-organized social media dashboard will assist you in navigating the platform more swiftly and efficiently, completing tasks. This is particularly critical if you must reply to client inquiries or interact with your audience in real-time.
Pricing
It’s essential to consider your budget when selecting a social media dashboard. While some dashboards are free, others require a monthly or yearly subscription. Choosing a tool that provides necessary features at a price point that fits your brand, along with scalability and value for money, is essential.
Additionally, it’s crucial to consider the tool’s capabilities – some may be priced high but offer limited features, while others may include valuable tools like sentiment analysis or natural language processing. Researching and ensuring that the selected tool is accurate and delivers what it promises is also important—otherwise, you’re throwing your money away.
Customer Support
When choosing a social media dashboard, looking for a platform that offers excellent customer support is crucial. This can include a comprehensive knowledge base, tutorials, and responsive customer service. A tool’s value can often be found in its onboarding experience, so choosing a dashboard that is easy to navigate and offers reliable assistance is essential.
Reviews and Ratings
Reading other users’ reviews and ratings is a great way to gather insights into a social media dashboard’s performance, features, and usefulness. By checking online reviews, you can get a sense of the tool’s strengths and weaknesses from the perspective of other users who have already experienced it.
You can look for reviews on the tool’s website, social media platforms, or other review websites such as G2 or Capterra. In addition to user reviews, look for any awards or recognition the social media dashboard has received. Industry awards, such as the Forrester Wave, evaluate various aspects of a company’s performance before placing their seal of approval on a social media dashboard. These awards can be a good indicator of a tool’s quality, reliability, and innovation.
Now that we’ve covered essential criteria for brands to consider when looking at social media dashboards, let’s dive into some of the top tools we believe are worth the money!
Comparison of top social media dashboard solutions
NetBase Quid®
NetBase Quid® is a social media analytics tool that provides a complete picture of brands by capturing online insights from various sources such as top social media channels, business profiles, forums, blogs, news articles, patent applications, consumer reviews, and more.
Additionally, the tool can integrate structured and unstructured data from businesses’ CRM and survey data to provide comprehensive and contextualized insights through social listening, monitoring, image analysis, competitive analysis, influencer identification, and crisis response.
NetBase Quid® helps businesses make strategic decisions related to brand health, campaign strategy, market trends, product innovation, competitive intelligence, key opinion leader identification, and strategic risk analysis. And Rival IQ and Hootsuite, our next two social media dashboards, can be fully integrated with NetBase Quid®.
Rival IQ
Rival IQ provides social media marketers with extensive analytics and competitive tracking capabilities, covering all areas of competition, including followers and engagement. Its most significant feature is the best-in-class competitor analysis, enabling users to set alerts for any move made by their competitors. The tool also provides essential metrics for audience growth, social media post frequency, emojis, and hashtags used, among others. Competitive benchmarking helps brands understand where they stand in the industry, while topic and phrase identification enables them to join relevant conversations.
Rival IQ also offers free head-to-head social media monitoring reports and live benchmarks for any industry, providing insight into consumer posts, engagement rates, top brands mentioned, and key trends.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media marketing platform offering various features, including social media management, social listening, content publishing, and analytics and reporting. Its advanced analytics tools allow brands to determine the effectiveness of their social media marketing efforts, including content and ad performance. With Hootsuite’s collaboration capabilities, teams can work on separate social media marketing projects, and in-built performance measurement features help monitor productivity in areas such as response and resolution of social media user queries.
Additionally, Hootsuite integrates with specialized tools like Rival IQ to track competitor brand mentions and publish social network content directly from the dashboard. The platform also allows users to create and customize reports with over 200 metrics, which can be exported in various formats, including PDF, PowerPoint, and Excel.
Napoleon Cat
Napoleon Cat is a social dashboard with various features to aid collaborative teams. Key features of Napoleon Cat include a social inbox that allows teams to collaborate, track, and respond to messages across multiple social channels and customer service tickets from a single dashboard.
Napoleon Cat’s publishing feature allows teams to automate post-approval, scheduling, and publishing across social media channels. Additionally, it provides analytics to track content performance, competitor channels, and social media campaign conversions. Users can also schedule automated reports. However, the software doesn’t support TikTok and lacks advanced publishing features. Also, the prices increase with more users.
SocialBee
Social Bee is a highly effective social media scheduling tool with an advanced publishing dashboard that includes bulk scheduling tools, content re-queuing, and a browser extension for post-curation. The tool provides helpful insights on audience, pages, and posts, along with several post-generation options, bulk scheduling capabilities, and evergreen content creation features. However, it lacks a social inbox.
Additionally, it allows users to plan social media posts, schedule posts for entire content categories, and create posting sequences that revive older posts. The browser extension helps users convert articles into posts or curate content ideas.
Benefits of Using Social Media Dashboards
There are many benefits to using social media platforms, and we’ll highlight some of the most important ones below
Monitoring in Real-time
Social media dashboards provide real-time information on your social media accounts, allowing you to track what people say about your brand, product, or service. This capability is crucial because unattended comments or feedback can lead to a real-time crisis. By receiving timely notifications on negative reviews or posts, users can promptly address the issue and avoid escalation. Failure to monitor in real-time exposes a brand to the risk of responding too late, and in some cases, the damage may already be irreparable.
Additionally, real-time monitoring allows you to take advantage of your consumers’ wants and desires. Consumers talk online all the time about what they want from brands; the sooner a brand knows what consumers want from them, the sooner they can deliver:
To illustrate, we utilized social listening and a personal narrative approach to identify a Reddit post where consumers shared their preferences for Netflix. It serves as an example of how real-time monitoring can help inform brands about their next move:
Moreover, without real-time monitoring, brands may lack critical information and miss out on trending topics that emerge overnight. They may miss out entirely if they fail to capture these emerging trends.
Multiple channel monitoring
Social media dashboards allow you to manage several social media accounts from a single platform, making it easier to stay organized and save time.
And this isn’t just convenient, but it allows you to understand the subtle differences in consumer conversations between social channels. Each social media platform has unique features, demographics, and audience behaviors influencing how people engage with content. Understanding these differences can help businesses tailor their social media strategy to better connect with their target audience.
Take Twitter, for instance, which prioritizes short-form content and enables users to engage in discussions and track real-time events via hashtags and trending topics. Meanwhile, Instagram is a photo and video-based platform that offers unique features such as stories and reels for users to share their daily experiences.
As a result, the same topic may be discussed differently across these social media channels. For instance, a particular topic may be trending on Instagram but not TikTok.
Below we can see the volume of discussions on the topic of Gaming across channels and how the volume vastly varies:
To ensure that your marketing efforts are optimized for each channel, it is crucial to have a social media dashboard that enables you to compare content across all social media channels.
Analytics and Reporting
Analytics and reporting are important components of social media dashboards because they provide insights and data that allow businesses to make informed decisions about their social media strategy. Analytics track indicators such as engagement, reach, clicks, and conversions, which can help organizations understand the behavior and preferences of their target audience. It can also measure sentiments which can reveal how consumers feel about a brand, its products, or its services:
Companies can use reporting to evaluate and interpret data, allowing them to measure the performance of their social media initiatives, identify areas for improvement, and alter their approach as needed. Reporting also delivers data-driven insights to organizations, allowing them to justify their social media marketing spending and convey their impact to stakeholders.
Analytics and reporting enable firms to optimize their social media strategy, analyze ROI, and make informed marketing decisions.
Effective Benchmarking
Hand in hand with the above is more effective benchmarking. This insight into your social media performance, such as engagement rates, reach, and follower growth, allows you to track your success and adjust your social media strategy.
Benchmarking is beneficial as it allows companies to compare their performance to industry standards or competitors, find areas for development, and establish strategies to improve their operations.
And by adopting best practices identified through benchmarking, businesses can enhance their efficiency and competitiveness. It also sets achievable goals based on industry norms and rivals’ performance, providing a roadmap for improving performance and meeting corporate objectives. Additionally, data-driven insights obtained from benchmarking can inform decision-making, including investments, process improvement, and resource allocation.
Competitive Analysis
With social media dashboards, it’s possible to track and analyze your competitors’ social media activity and compare it to your own. This allows you to gather information on their products, pricing, marketing strategies, and overall business operations to identify areas where they excel and may fall short.
Through competitive analysis, businesses can gain insight into how their competitors position themselves in the market and identify opportunities to differentiate themselves. By understanding their competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, companies can develop more effective marketing, pricing, and product development strategies. Additionally, competitive analysis helps businesses assess the potential risks and challenges of entering or expanding into a market.
Social media monitoring points out the strengths and weakness of three different automotive brands when it comes to customer care, innovativeness, quality, and value:
This information can be used to inform brands of where they excel, and where they fall flat, and then adjust accordingly.
Integration
To maximize their benefits, applications should not be siloed. Integration is necessary. Savvy social media dashboards can integrate with other tools and platforms, such as email marketing software or customer relationship management (CRM) systems, enabling businesses to streamline their marketing efforts and improve overall efficiency.
When integrated, a social media dashboard can provide multiple options to help you maximize your goals, whether creating a comprehensive customer view, identifying critical social conversations, or enriching your data. Integration is essential to creating an effective strategy, as it allows for a complete understanding of the situation.
Conclusion: The Future of Social Media Dashboards
Social media dashboards will continue to grow and evolve in the future and they must keep up and adapt as social media networks continue to expand and introduce new features and tools.
Incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into social media dashboards is a trend that will likely continue as well. This allows for more comprehensive analysis and insights and automation of specific operations like scheduling and content generation.
As brands seek new and more effective ways to manage and leverage their social media presence, the future of social media dashboards will likely see ongoing innovation and development. And this means brands need a tool that scales right along with the growth.
To obtain the most accurate information for making informed decisions, it’s essential to utilize advanced AI, natural language processing, and real-time monitoring provided by social media dashboards like NetBase Quid®. If your brand requires such advanced intelligence, reach out for a demo and embrace the future of social media dashboards.
