So, your social media reporting dashboard is full of data, but you can’t make much sense of it. You’re confused about what you should be measuring, what the numbers mean, and how any of it relates to your overall strategy.
If this is you, it might be time to rethink your dashboard. Because, aside from simply showing metrics like reach, engagement, or impressions, your social media reporting dashboard should help you decide what to do next.
There is no laundry-list of metrics that will indicate the usefulness of a social media dashboard. The metrics that matter will vary depending on your role (a CEO and a social media content creator will need very different data!).
The main thing is that your dashboard helps you advance your strategy, and, ultimately, drive real business outcomes.
In this article, we’ll break down how exactly a great social media reporting dashboard can strengthen your marketing strategy, plus the features and metrics that are most important for a range of stakeholders.
What is a social media reporting dashboard, and what should it include?
First things first: A social media reporting dashboard is an analytics tool that allows you to view the performance of all your social media accounts in one place.
The days of logging into platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are long over. These dashboards pull metrics like reach, clicks, and shares from all of your social media platforms and display them side by side.
A dashboard’s goal is to help you understand which aspects of your social media marketing are working (and which are not working). Over time, this will give you an idea of what to do differently.
Any good social media reporting dashboard should help you answer the following four questions, in the context of your goals and your role:
1. What happened? For instance, what posts are working? What gets engagement? Which posts receive unusually low distribution?
2. What changed? How does one type of content compare to another? How are your posts performing this week compared to last? Did you get an unusual spike in new followers yesterday?
3. Why does it matter? Are these numbers leading to real business outcomes? Are they driving leads? Purchases?
And, finally…
4. What should we do next? What ideas are resonating with audiences? What posts make them click the buy button or download a lead magnet?
If your existing social media dashboard shows you a bunch of numbers, but isn’t leading to your next decision… it might be time to get a new one.
Which metrics should I be looking at on my social media dashboard?
The metrics that are relevant to you will depend on your role in the business. An executive, a social media manager, and a paid ads specialist will all need very different types of visibility. Each dashboard should be selected and organised based on the decisions its user needs to make.
| Role | What they need to know | Important metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Social Media Manager | What content is working and why? | Reach, engagement rate, impressions, shares, saves, clicks, views, follower growth |
| Paid Media Specialist | Where is spend producing the best ROI? | Spend, CPA, CPL, CPC, CPM, ROAS |
| Marketing Manager | How is social contributing to marketing objectives? | Channel performance, traffic, leads, conversions |
| Executive | Is social delivering business value? | MER, trends, key events, investment |
What does a social media manager need from a social media reporting dashboard?
As a social media manager, your dashboard needs to tell you which posts performed well and why, so you can adjust your content accordingly.
You will need your dashboard to show metrics like reach, impressions, engagement rate, comments, shares, saves, clicks, and video views, so that you can understand how your content performed. Audience metrics like net follower growth and audience demographics are also important.
Your dashboard should allow you to compare posts against benchmarks, previous periods, or similar types of content, so you understand what’s working and what’s not. Look for a platform that lets you break down posts by factors like format, topic, content pillar, tone, or platform, using tags or a search function. For instance, do your carousels outperform static images? Does educational content do better on Instagram than TikTok?
Finally, opt for a dashboard with a content-centric view, meaning that the actual social media post (plus a link to view it in situ on its platform) sits alongside its performance.
What does a paid media team need from a social media reporting dashboard?
If you’re on a paid media team, you need a dashboard that indicates the return on investment from your social media advertising. Your dashboard should reveal exactly where you’re spending and which sources are driving the outcomes you want.
To understand your marketing efficiency, look for a dashboard that shows you exactly what you’re spending per outcome. Here are some common metrics to look for:
- Cost per acquisition (CPA) (AKA cost per conversion)
- Cost per lead (CPL)
- Cost per click (CPC)
- Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
- Return on ad spend (ROAS)
Paid media teams should look for dashboards that let them monitor the performance of paid campaigns over time. For instance, the Digivizer platform lets you track multiple metrics over any time period on the same graph.
In sum, a dashboard should help you optimize campaign performance, giving you as much bang for your buck as possible.
What does a marketing manager need from a social media reporting dashboard?
Marketing managers typically need to understand performance in terms of broader marketing objectives, so their dashboard should give them an idea of how social contributes to overarching goals.
They’re evaluating what role social media should play in the marketing strategy, where it’s working, and where resources should go.
If you’re a marketing manager, your social media analytics dashboard should let you compare performance across channels, paid content and organic content. It should help you connect content to key events like conversions and enquiries. And, on a more general level, your dashboard should quickly reveal trends across content types without you needing to scroll through dozens of posts, so you can understand what sort of content is performing best.
Finally, look out for dashboards that have inbuilt reporting features, making it easier to communicate those hard-earned results to your executives or clients.
What does an executive need from a social media reporting dashboard?
If you’re an executive, your social media dashboard should show the business impact of all your campaigns so you know where your money is best spent.
You’ll want to be able to see all social media-influenced revenue to help you calculate your total marketing efficiency ratio (MER) and understand the productivity of your marketing team. Understanding performance over time is also important for you; ideally, your dashboard should let you see period-on-period performance across virtually any date range.
Look for a platform that provides concise summaries and action items, so you can get insights quickly without going through every little metric. A great dashboard should include features like automatic reporting, so the key takeaways appear in your inbox without you lifting a finger. This shouldn’t just show numbers; it should tell you how your marketing results connect to wider business operations and outcomes.
Should paid and organic social be reported together?
Paid and organic social should not be reported together as a single number, but they should be looked at in tandem to understand your overarching marketing strategy.
The two can and should complement each other and amplify a brand together. However, their performance should still be viewed separately to understand what each does.
For instance, paid content helps you reach audiences more reliably, while high-quality organic content builds their trust. On the flipside, organic content helps you understand what resonates with audiences, insights that you can apply later to your paid campaigns.
What are the most common social media dashboard mistakes?
There are a few common mistakes that brands make when using social media dashboards.
Firstly, they track the wrong metrics. It’s important to track the metrics that reflect the objective you’re trying to achieve, not just the ones that are available.
Another mistake is ignoring the context behind the numbers. A post might get 2,000 impressions, but if you don’t compare these numbers to your own benchmarks, you don’t know what that really means. Similarly, not tagging or categorizing content can make it hard to identify trends later on.
Lastly, brands trip up when they fail to identify what they learned and what they should do next. A good dashboard should help you clearly see the next step forward: do you need to create more educational content, or reduce spend on an underperforming campaign, for instance?
Remember, a social media reporting dashboard is only as valuable as the decisions it helps you make, and the outcomes it helps you achieve. If your dashboard doesn’t help you answer the question “what should we do next?”, it might be time to consider a change.
How Digivizer helps teams see performance more clearly
Digivizer’s social media reporting platform lets you compare all social media analytics across multiple brands, channels, and platforms in one place.
The dashboard provides real-time, detailed, and actionable performance insights for your paid and organic content, as well as organic search and web insights. It helps you compare content in the ways that are relevant to you: across periods, benchmarks, content types, platforms, and more. And when you’re ready to share, you can send anyone in your organization a custom report, for any date range, straight to their inbox.
No more confusion, no more guessing, just a single source of truth to help you identify your next marketing moves.
See how Digivizer can help improve your social media reporting.
FAQs:
How often should social media dashboards be reviewed?
How often you review a social media dashboard should depend on the decisions you need to make.
Social media teams need to know what content to create, so they would be checking post performance on a daily basis. Similarly, paid media teams might review their dashboards daily to optimize their content and campaigns. Marketing managers, for whom social media is just one part of their remit, may check less often, while executives may check less often still. For these professionals, the social media dashboard will serve as an overview of just one area of marketing, not as a daily tool.
What’s the difference between a social media dashboard and a social media marketing report?
A social media dashboard offers you a real-time view of your social media performance, while a social media marketing report is a summary and interpretation of that data.
A social media dashboard is continuously updated, interactive and filterable; it lets you explore the data and helps you spot changes.
A social media marketing report is a static snapshot of performance for a particular time period or purpose. It’s used to communicate social media marketing results to a range of stakeholders, selecting the most important findings and more explicitly identifying the next recommended step.
