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A few weeks back we shared our recommendations for a killer Content Marketing dashboard. This post will follow with our tips for an optimized Social Media dashboard. We will run through some basic operational metrics that your Social Media Managers will find critical for improving performance, some insightful visualizations and the crucial business KPIs your Executives will want to see.
As your objectives with Social Media Marketing may in fact be similar to those of Content Marketers, we’ll skip over the background pretty quickly, but if you’d like further details, check out our previous post: Content Marketing Dashboard.
First, let’s run through the 3 fundamentals of a successful dashboard:
First and foremost, numbers or charts on a page mean nothing without context. If you are unable to link your metrics to key organizational objectives, give them context and make them actionable, you cannot hope to improve performance.
While Social Media Managers will require a high level of operational detail, this would be redundant to Executives who will be more interested in tying efforts to revenue outcomes. So make sure each team member sees exactly what they need to be able to perform their function effectively. This sort of data governance allows teams to successfully interact without distracting them from their key goals.
On the other hand, watch out for those vanity metrics on your operational dashboard. Fans and followers alone won’t mean anything. The quickest way to turn these from vanity metrics into insightful pieces of information? Give them context and tie them into larger organizational goals!
Don’t forget the importance of organizing your data in a logical and understandable way. Grouping relevant KPIs/visualizations together can provide improved contextual understanding and encourage your team to continue using and acting on the information presented in their dashboard.
How are we doing it? Often we find that grouping data together in your dashboard by Social Channel can help you to understand its success. Others are grouping it by objectives or brands. The use of multiple dashboards or different tabs can help you to make your data more consumer-friendly.
This is not the end of the tale, however. Images and textual Storytelling can provide crucial insights and augment the delivery of your information.
So let’s move on to some specific recommendations for:
While each Social Network uses varying names for different actions, for the purpose of brevity, we will use generic terms across networks to share some of the most useful operational metrics for Social Media marketers, broken down by goal:
Apart from measuring metrics related to objectives, it is also useful to measure Social Media output and compare this to your outcomes. For example, does your Content Rate (the number of content pieces you produce) impact on your outcomes? and which content type has the greatest impact. By knowing the answers to these questions you can concentrate your efforts on the types of content that best help you reach your goals. The same applies to the topic on which the content was produced and the channel it was posted on.
To optimize your content and promotion you should understand which channels are most impactful, which type of content best contributes to meeting your goals, what topics are appreciated most by social consumers and at what frequency you get the best results. Improving your social content mix is vital to best leverage the limited time and budget of your Social Media Marketing team.
Will your CMO care about the number of followers you have? Or the number of mentions you received on each Social channel yesterday? Probably not, even where you have been able to turn them from vanity metrics to meaningful insights by providing context and using benchmarks.
So what are the top KPIs we would recommend presenting to your CMO?
Revenue KPIs will most likely make up the bulk of Social indicators on your CMO’s dashboard.
Executives will most likely want to know the average Cost per Lead/Social Acquisition/Conversion, as well as Revenue per Social Lead/Follower/Customer. Additionally, they will most likely request an indication of Total Revenue from Social Referrals in order to compare Social Performance to other Marketing Performance. Understanding how your social efforts contribute to the overall success of the larger department can help them to distribute budgets and personnel appropriately.
KPIs or charts that enable them to compare Social Average Order Value (AOV) vs Total AOV and Social Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) vs Total LTV will also assist the with this task.
Knowing the Growth Rate of Social Customers in conjunction with Revenue per Social Customer can also help Executives to forecast Revenue and is therefore a great KPI to include on your Executive Social Dashboard.
Finally, these stakeholders will most certainly request Social ROI. This is another valuable KPI for allowing them to understand the success of your social efforts and compare them to the success of other marketing departments.
Correctly measuring some of these may be difficult as customers go through elaborate customer journeys and being influenced today by something seen on Social Media may not result in an immediate purchase. Providing the most accurate data where possible, however, whether taken from social listening platforms, social or digital analytics tools, or from surveys or customer interactions can help to validate the impact of marketing initiatives on larger organizational goals.
Depending on the function of the Social team and the extent of cross over with Customer Support, your Executives may wish to see a number of indicators based on Customer Success.
Firstly, they may wish to evaluate the success of customer support through social channels with a Social Customer Support Success KPI computed by considering things such as response time, resolution rate and ratings on service satisfaction.
Additionally, however, it may be useful for them to understand how loyal these Social customers are compared to other segments. Therefore, Social Retention/Social Churn, Social Customer Satisfaction and Social Net Promoter Score KPIs could add significant value to an Executive’s dashboard.
Your CMO or VPs may also request information on the efficiency of your department. They may wish to know the optimum level of output, interaction and promotion for the best results and to compare these to your level or activity.
Visualizations hold great value in their ability to allow us to compare performance across different segments, sources, campaigns, timeframes etc. Both an operational Social Media dashboard as well as a strategic Social Media dashboard would benefit from a visualization comparing social performance to performance across other channels. The example below demonstrates that both social Average Order Value and Customer Lifetime Value are relatively high. This should encourage those in control of budgets to dedicate a reasonable amount to the social team, where the share of Social Revenue is also high.
Visualizing the growth rate of Social Revenue as well as its % of Total Revenue could also bring significant value to your Strategic Social dashboard as it indicates the importance of Social within your larger efforts.
What else would you like to see on either your operational or strategic social dashboard?
VP of Business Development for Sweetspot. Responsible for strategic brand development, marketing and business development. BA/BComm graduate from the University of Melbourne. My passion lies in finding creative solutions and encouraging collaboration.
Not Another Dashboard.
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