5 must-have social media dashboard templates for brands

Picture this: You’re in a meeting with top executives and stakeholders. They ask you to quantify your team’s performance across social channels and accounts, and explain how your performance influences company goals.

You know raw social analytics is complex, and sharing it with people who have limited hands-on-the-keyboard social experience is ineffective.

So instead of getting granular, you provide them with a digestible overview of your most important KPIs. You tell a compelling data story that helps them visualize how your customer care, awareness and engagement efforts matter to your company’s big picture. You captivate your audience and prove the power of social.

Slam dunk.

Using a social media dashboard to glean vital insights from your data will help you successfully convey your team’s impact every time. In this article, we’re highlighting examples of social media dashboards you can use to illustrate the value of social media across your business.

What is a social media dashboard?

A social media dashboard is a tool that aggregates your crucial social media metrics across networks to quickly measure the performance of your posts/campaigns, customer care interactions and community engagement.

Social media dashboards empower you to dissect results, iterate strategy, demonstrate value and influence decision making.

What should you include in a social media dashboard?

Every data dashboard serves a different function—from tracking brand awareness to aggregating marketing metrics in one place. Your social media dashboards should be built with your unique use cases in mind. While the ingredients for each dashboard might be different, the core component is visualized metrics that help explain why your brand did or didn’t meet a goal.

To help determine the specifics you should include in your dashboard, ask yourself these five questions:

• What is the goal of this dashboard? (Example: demonstrate positive changes in brand reputation)
• Which metrics matter most to achieving this goal? (Example: sentiment)
• Who is the audience and how much do they know about the topic? (Example: CMO and R&D)
• Which channels need to be measured? (Example: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter)
• What is the duration of time needed to effectively measure change? (Example: one month)

Ultimately, you should have multiple social media dashboards for different stakeholders and purposes. For example, one for tracking monthly changes in brand reputation and sentiment, as seen in the example above. Another for sharing quarterly customer care productivity.

By using a platform like Sprout Social, you can access and create custom social media dashboard templates that save you time and efficiently deliver presentation-ready dashboards for different business segments.

Social media dashboard templates to use across your organization

Here are five types of social media dashboard templates designed to help marketing leaders level-up their reporting and refine their data-driven strategy.

Social customer care dashboard

Customer care is an essential function of social media. A social customer care dashboard measures, benchmarks and analyzes your team’s efforts, and reveals any critical opportunities to improve customer support. This dashboard is especially important for enterprise brands who typically have larger teams managing incoming requests across multiple accounts.

• Goal: Provide visibility into customer care team performance
• Metrics: Response rate, action rate, average time to action and total actioned messages
• Audience: Customer care/support teams, sales, marketing and product development
• Channels: Cross-channel inboxes (Pro tip: Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all incoming messages and mentions into one single stream)
• Cadence: Monthly, quarterly and yearly

A customer care dashboard will help you illuminate how many messages your brand receives, your response rate and your average response time, like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report demonstrates.

Business intelligence dashboard

There are times when you need to take social data outside of your social media management platform. For example, consolidating touchpoints between social media and your CRM gives you a more in-depth understanding of your audience.

A business intelligence dashboard will help you access all your consumer data in one place to get a birds-eye view of how social media fits into the larger picture. This dashboard enables you to analyze data, create custom metrics and merge different data sources.

• Goal: Track the customer journey across digital touchpoints (including social)
• Metrics: Customized to meet your goals. Examples include engagements per network/per state, ad impressions and email CTR
• Audience: Executives and stakeholders
• Channels: Cross-channel
• Cadence: Quarterly and yearly

As Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector displays, you gain valuable insights by combining the power of social data with other business channels into one dashboard. This ensures social data and insights are included in your 360-degree view of your customers—proving the value social brings to your business.

Social media engagement dashboard

Social media engagement is a barometer of how much your audience interacts with your content. When examining engagement metrics across months or years, a birds’ eye view dashboard can help you identify performance trends that improve your content strategy. With these insights, you can continuously replicate the success of your most liked/commented on posts.

• Goal: Determine if your content resonates with your audience
• Metrics: Impressions, engagements, link clicks, ad spend and conversions
• Audience: Social media team and other stakeholders who influence content direction
• Channels: Cross-channel or channel-specific
• Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Here are a few examples of Sprout Social’s social media engagement dashboards that give you the tools to proactively grow your audience and repeatedly test your content direction.

• Profile Performance Report provides a high-level aggregation of analytics so you can get a pulse on the performance of your social profiles. With this report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok metrics to better understand the impact of your social efforts.

• The Post Performance Report helps you analyze your published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience. It provides a unified view of your post performance across all social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok.

• Our Cross-Network Paid Performance Report consolidates paid campaign-level data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. From the Overview tab you can see a summary of your paid performance, impressions, engagements, web conversions, video views and a breakdown of key performance metrics by channel.

Brand awareness dashboard

Brand awareness requires continuous effort and frequent pulse checks. Use data to determine your reach, earned media value and share of voice.

• Goal: Analyze rates of target audience recognition and awareness
• Metrics: Impressions, reach, engagements, mentions, earned media value and sentiment
• Audience: Teams across marketing, including social media
• Channels: Cross-channel
• Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Sprout’s Listening tools help brands tap into global social conversation to extract actionable insights that improve brand health and fuel brand awareness. With Sprout’s Listening dashboards, you can track conversations concerning your brand to illuminate consumer attitudes, gain visibility into customer experience and sentiment, conduct competitive analysis and stay up to date with trends in your industry.

As many social media managers will tell you, achieving organic awareness and reach on social media is harder than ever. At Sprout, our team uses employee advocacy to breakthrough and track our success with brand awareness dashboards in our Employee Advocacy platform.

Here are two examples of employee advocacy dashboards we use on a monthly and quarterly basis:

• Sprout’s Advocacy General Report provides an overview of our latest activity. The report analyzes the number of active stories, total shares and shares across each network, and how that translates into potential reach and earned media value. As you scroll, you can see sharing trends, the highest volume of sharing activity and overall story performance, top users by shares and top users by potential reach.

• Sprout’s Advocacy Content Report dives deeper into data gleaned from your active content. You can see how many shareable or internal stories were active each day along with a comparison to the previous month. The Content Breakdown chart provides stats on shareable and internal content including days, views, shares, engagement and potential reach for each Story.

Executive dashboard

Most executives aren’t immersed in the world of social media on a frequent basis. Metrics that are meaningful to you and your team miss the mark when communicating with the C-suite. As a result, you might struggle to secure buy-in and investment to take your social efforts to the next level.

For best results, create customized reports for leadership that bridge knowledge gaps at the executive level and translate the raw data into a narrative that resonates with anyone in leadership. Create an executive summary of your most compelling social media reports to convince even the most skeptical executives about the impact social has on your business.

• Goal: Deliver clear evidence of social team’s impact
• Metrics: Customized to each executive. Examples include share of voice, potential reach, earned media value, customer care productivity and competitor analysis data
• Audience: Teams across marketing, including social media
• Channels: Cross-channel
• Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Use Sprout Social’s Report Builder features to create custom reports specific to your business needs to easily track your most valued social data. Choose which metrics are included in reports to evaluate performance based on your specific business goals.

How to create a social media dashboard

To set up your own social media dashboard, follow these steps to quickly review/report on your strategy and highlight your team’s performance.

1. Determine purpose and audience

The first step toward creating a social media dashboard is figuring out its purpose. What goal is this dashboard trying to achieve? Who will it reach? How familiar are they with the topic? Clearly define your purpose and audience before doing anything else.

2. Decide which kind of dashboard to create

Decide which kind of dashboard best fits your needs. Choose a dashboard with relevant metrics that align with your goals and demonstrate social’s value to stakeholders. Be mindful of your audience and their social media experience level when deciding how detailed your dashboard should be.

Revisit the five social media dashboard types mentioned in this article for inspiration.

3. Gather the metrics

Next, you’re ready to dig into the data. Scope out which networks need to be measured and the length of time required to demonstrate meaningful results. Collect raw data across those channels during that time period. You can start by using metrics from the native apps, like engagement rate, reach, followers and plays.

To up your sophistication level and boost efficiency with a simpler workflow, use a social media analytics tool like Sprout Social to streamline/automate the data collection process and easily generate dashboards that are ready to share.

4. Share with stakeholders

Transform the raw figures into riveting dashboards and data visualizations. Use key data points, complementary graphs and your expert analysis to give stakeholders a visual depiction of your team’s progress.

After creating your first dashboard, repeat the first three steps for each dashboard you need. Keep momentum going by updating your dashboards on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis and resharing them with stakeholders.

Include everything you need in your social media dashboard by using Sprout Social

Social media dashboards convert your cumbersome social data into influential stories that are easy to absorb. By breaking down complexity and clearly communicating your findings with stakeholders, you will elevate the importance of social media across your entire company.

Sprout simplifies the dashboard creation process so managers have more time to focus on refining their team’s strategy and communicating social’s impact.

To access Sprout’s full library of social media dashboard templates, start your free trial today.

Start your free Sprout trial