Creating a Dashbooard For Your Social Media

As the scope of social media continues to expand and the type of marketing platforms seem to have no limit, it becomes increasingly important to focus on our stated social media and overall marketing objectives to determine how well (or otherwise) our key performance indicators (KPI's) are being met over time.


To be able to answer this we need to do a couple of key things.


Firstly we need to be clear about what it is we want to be able to measure from its existing point moving forward and why these measures are the key ones for us. If we focus on the wrong measures, then even if they are properly assessed, the result will provide little useful data for the business.

Secondly and almost as almost as important is the way the metrics will be displayed. Too often, managers are inundated with and overwhelmed by copious amounts of raw data making it difficult to focus clearly on the key data points and trends.

For this reason it is wise to set up a simple, efficient and practical dashboard that will provide management with facts and figures designed to update and provide added insight into what has transpired.


There are I'm pleased to say various existing providers of Dashboard templates and resources available. Some are free and some will cost you some money.

iGoogle (www.google.com/ig) and MyYahoo (http://my.yahoo.com) both for example provide free tools for the respective Google and Yahoo home pages.

For Twitter, Hootsuite (www.hootsuite.com) provides a dashboard specifically for the brief Twitter messages.

Specifically for social media you have free dashboard services such as: Pageflakes (www.pageflakes.com/default.aspx) as well as paid versions from suppliers such as: UberVU (www.ubervu.com)


Regardless of whether you opt for the free service or pay a little more for the one of

the paid options, the point is simply that you need to be starting to get your structure set up so that all valuable information is routinely gathered, analysed, seen and understood by the business.



Until next time,
Good marketing and good luck.