What is a social media dashboard?
A social media dashboard is an interface tool that consolidates data from multiple sources (e.g., Instagram, Twitter, Facebook) to track and display key performance indicators (KPIs) (e.g., engagement rate, follower growth, reach), enabling teams and agencies to monitor social media performance and create presentations for clients and executives.
Social media dashboards are typically built using flexible tools like Google Looker Studio, Power BI, Google Sheets, or platform-specific solutions to enable high customization and integration of multiple data sources.
What to include in a social media dashboard?
An actionable social media dashboard balances context and specificity based on the audience (executives, managers, and analysts) and their use cases.
Executive social media dashboards
Executive dashboards for CMOs, CEOs, and clients show social media's bottom-line impact. Reviewed weekly, monthly, or quarterly, they include:
- Social media ROI analysis: by platform, using engagement metrics and follower growth.
- Audience analysis: demographics, interests, and behavior insights.
- Content performance analysis: top-performing posts, engagement by content type.
- Add text for additional context to translate metrics for non-technical audiences. Present in slide decks and simplified Looker Studio reports.
Social media manager dashboards
Manager dashboards have cross-platform views with drill-downs to see performance by client, brand, region, team member, and campaign. They help align teams, define tactics, and include:
- Cross-platform reporting: overall performance, audience insights, and content effectiveness across platforms.
- Goal tracking: compare current performance vs objectives.
- Audits for prioritization and spotting issues
- Competitive analysis for platform and content strategy mapping.
- Topic, keyword, content, audience research
Operational Social Media Dashboards
Operational dashboards for analysts and social media managers have granular, customizable KPIs to solve technical issues. Monitored hourly, daily, or weekly, they cover:
- Engagement: likes, comments, shares, engagement rate.
- Growth: follower growth, reach, impressions.
- Content: post performance, optimal posting times, trending topics/hashtags.
Operational social media dashboards are highly customized, built in flexible tools like Google Sheets or Looker Studio to enable data cleaning, blending, annotations, and integrating multiple sources.
How to build a social media dashboard?
To build a social media dashboard, connect your data sources, choose a template on Looker Studio or Sheets, build your queries by selecting metrics and dimensions, choose charts to visualize your data, customize the dashboard, design and share via link, PDF or email.
Here’s the breakdown:
Connect data sources
Define and connect the data sources to bring to your dashboard. Common sources are Instagram, Twitter, Facebook for social media performance, and CRM for audience data.
To connect your data sources, go to portermetrics.com, choose the data sources to bring to your dashboard.
You can follow these tutorials on connecting your data:
Choose a template
Choose from dozens of social media dashboard templates in Google Sheets or Looker Studio, designed for use cases like engagement monitoring, follower growth, and content performance.
Learn to copy Looker Studio templates.
While templates are the starting point. Make them specific for your business or agency. Map your specific metrics, especially custom engagement metrics, CRM contact data, and all the fields and metrics that you define as "engagement" and "reach".
Depending on your reporting tool—Google Sheets or Google Looker Studio, pick any of the dozens of templates created by our team and customers to solve your social media reporting use cases, such as engagement monitoring, follower growth, and content performance.
Select metrics, dimensions, and charts
Once your dashboard template is downloaded, you may 1)modify it or 2) create a blank page to build it from scratch. Whatever the case, setting up a query always follows these steps:
- Select the data source and the account connected to it
- Choose metrics (e.g. Likes, comments, shares, reach, etc.).
- Choose breakdowns to segment your data (e.g. by date, post type, hashtag, etc.)
You can follow these tutorials on adding data to your dashboards
Design
To make your social media dashboards truly white-label you can add logos, colors, fonts, and styling to mirror your brand.
Follow these tutorials to design your social media dashboards:
Share
Share your social media dashboards via links, PDF, schedule emails, and control permissions.
KPIs to include in a social media dashboard?
Social media dashboards should include a mix of visibility, engagement, growth, and content performance metrics and KPIs to fully understand the performance of social media activities towards business goals. They include:
Social media KPIs measure the engagement process, regardless of the platform:
- Visibility metrics: impressions, reach, followers
- Engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares, video plays
- Growth metrics: follower growth, reach expansion
Efficiency KPIs compare your social media outputs to the cost, including:
- Visibility: CPM (Cost per Mille)
- Engagement: CPC (Cost per Click)
- Growth: CPA (Cost per Acquisition)
Effectiveness KPIs compare the input with the output from one stage to another
- Visibility: Frequency
- Engagement: engagement rate
- Growth: follower growth rate
To analyze these social media KPIs, segment them by:
- Platform: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook
- Time: Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly
- Campaign: content type, objective
- Business: client, branch, region
- Audience: geo, tech, demographics, interests, behavior, placement
- Content: creatives, format, topic, hashtag
