Putting Together An Effective Dashboard For Your Busines

 Increasing Complexity

As the scope of social media continues to expand and the type of marketing platforms seem to have no limits, it becomes increasingly important to focus on your stated social media and overall marketing objectives to determine how well (or otherwise) our key performance indicators (KPI's) are being met over time for each platform. To be able to answer this with confidence you need to do a couple of key things. 

Firstly you need to be clear about what it is we want to be able to measure from its existing point (i.e. baseline reading) moving forward and why these measures are the key ones for you.  If you 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 and overwhelmed by copious amounts of raw data making it difficult to focus clearly on the key data points and trends that really matter and provide the basis for true insight and future decision making.

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 this added understanding 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.

Possible Providers

 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: 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.

Additional Training Resources

Naturally to learn more about any aspect of Social or Digital Media marketing click on to this link:
http://www.victorianchamber.com.au/business-solutions/training/course

And so until next time, good marketing and good luck. 

Regards,

Daniele.