Dashboard

It serves as a control center for monitoring live data, such as engagement rates, follower growth, click-through rates, impressions, and audience demographics, making it vital for assessing the performance of social media posts, campaigns, and ads.

Social media management tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, and Sprout Social commonly have dashboards. Individual social media platforms like Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics have dashboards in their analytics sections. These dashboards are often filled with customizable widgets and tailored reporting features that allow the user to see the data necessary to achieve specific goals.

Dashboards for social media are especially beneficial because they save time. There's an account for every social media platform, and a platform for every account. But with these, a person could be posting five times a day—yet only a fraction of those posts will reach even half of the intended audience. When the accounts are combined together with the platforms, dashboards help save time, allow users to schedule posts (with tools like Hootsuite), let teams collaborate (also on tools like Hootsuite), and provide plenty of actionable insights that help optimize the kind of strategies which will make the branding a success.

Regardless of whether one is a small business owner, an influencer, a social media manager, or the head of a large enterprise, dashboards are an essential and often underappreciated tool for making sense of the many variables one must manage to stay on top of the business of social media. They allow one to see workflow efficiencies and inefficiencies. You can see real-time trends and have a glimpse of the not-so-distant future. You can identify what human (or algorithmic) intelligence might glean as your social media 'weaknesses.'