How to Get the Most Out of Your Social Media Dashboard
A good social media management tool should not only help you save time and become more efficient, but also provide you with the tools you need to improve your social media strategy and the results you get. In this blog post, I’m going to share with you my top tips for how to get the most out of your social media dashboard.
How to use monitoring features to discover potential leads, engagement opportunities and more
One of the most important aspects of a good social media marketing strategy is lots of monitoring – for engagement opportunities, for potential leads, for brand monitoring and customer service issues and so on.
All social media dashboards (at least that I know of) have some sort of monitoring function. What you have to do, is set up a few monitoring searches with the most relevant keywords and hashtags in your niche, which should then be checked regularly:
- Discover engagement opportunities: in order to be successful on social media, you need to engage as much as possible. The more you engage, the more engagement you receive in return: shares and retweets, likes and comments, clicks, new followers and so on. Check your monitoring searches as often as you can and look for conversations that are happening that you could join.
- Discover potential leads: with monitoring, you can discover potential leads that you can then nurture via social media and other platforms, such as e-mail. Some tools, like Agorapulse, for example, allow you to set up monitoring for only certain languages or particular locations, which can help you with discovering the most relevant potential leads:
Sendible, another social media management dashboard, offers built-in e-mail and SMS marketing tools that allow you to nurture the leads and, hopefully, convert them.
- Brand monitoring and customer service: whenever someone mentions your brand name on social media, it’s essential that you are aware of it as soon as possible. Make sure to set up monitoring searches for your brand name and check it regularly; this way, you will be able to respond to any customer service issues promptly, and discover potential brand ambassadors and influencers to connect with.
How to use analytics to improve your social media marketing strategy
One of the best ways to quickly and easily improve your social media strategy is to know what works and what doesn’t. Most social media management tools will offer some sort of analytics, which you should check as often as possible.
In order to be able to use analytics to your advantage, you need to focus on actionable metrics, rather than vanity metrics. Vanity metrics, such as number of followers or fans, are stats that, ultimately, no matter how good they might make you feel about your success (hence the term “vanity metrics”), they don’t exactly help you achieve anything. Actionable metrics, on the other hand, allow you to take action and make changes to your social media strategy in order to improve your success:
For example, look into what content gets you the most engagement and vice versa: why is that content getting you more retweets, or comments? Why is some content not performing? Can you find any common threads between them, that you can use to improve the content you’ll post from now on? It could be that it’s the type of update that makes the difference – i.e. video, images, text – or it could be the subject of the update.
It’s also useful to stay on top of any trends among your target audience: what are your most successful hashtags? Which hashtags is your audience using the most? Using hashtags, on several social networks, can be very helpful with reaching more users and improving your engagement levels.
At the end of the day, the metrics that matter the most to you are the ones affected by your overall goals. If you’re using social media mainly for customer service, for example, it would be useful to know what your response rate and time are. Or, if you’re looking to improve your brand awareness, you might be more interested in how your engagement has evolved over time, as your follower numbers have grown.
Use influencer marketing to improve your social media presence
Influencer marketing is one of the best ways to improve your social media presence and even get more leads and conversions. Thankfully, more and more social media dashboards are including powerful customer relationship management tools in their list of features.
Some, like Agorapulse, also show you if you have any influencers or brand ambassadors already following you. Otherwise, use other tools (such as Buzzsumo, for example) to find any potential influencers in your niche.
Once you’ve identified them, you can start engaging in order to build a relationship with them. With a CRM tool, you can make things easier for yourself. You can tag users in order to organize them and keep track of them, make notes so that you don’t forget any important details, or check all of your past conversations with a user so that you’re never out of the loop.
Save time publishing updates
One of the biggest draws of using a social media management tool is the ability to post updates to several different social media platforms from the same place and, perhaps even more importantly, to schedule updates.
Scheduling, planning and organizing can help you not only save a lot of valuable time, but also with improving your overall productivity and results.
Many tools now offer editorial calendars for all of your social media updates, so that you can visualize them by day and identify more easily and times and dates where you’ve forgotten to schedule something.
If you have any evergreen content, schedule it to be re-published regularly so that you can get as much out of it as possible.
Don’t forget though to also actively engage with other users; while you might be getting some engagement and clicks on your scheduled updates, it’s active engagement that truly drives the best results for any type of social media campaign.
Make use of your team to save time
Social media is a 24/7 job, which makes it quite difficult to only have one person managing it. Especially as your presence grows on social platforms, you’ll need some help to keep up.
Use your social media dashboard to have your team collaborate in a more organized way, rather than have everyone use the same account.
Most tools will let you assign tasks to different members of your team, leave them notes and so on.
Conclusion
As you can see, a good social media dashboard can be of great help with improving your social media results and ROI. Depending on your goals from social media, you’ll need different features, but you can use a tool to compare the top social media management tools and find the perfect one for you. What is the most important feature you’re looking for in a social media dashboard?
Continue reading here: Brand Your Work With Effective Video Marketing Strategy
Was this article helpful?
