What Is a Social Media Dashboard and What Are Its Core Features

Social media management is a balancing act requiring you to create, track, analyse, and adjust content, campaigns, and strategies across multiple platforms.

If you’ve ever wondered how top managers keep on top of the latest TikTok trends while also optimising LinkedIn content, you’re not alone. 

While there’s no “secret sauce” to running concurrent social media strategies for a handful of clients, there are certainly some key ingredients. 

A social media dashboard is one of the most important tools for any marketing manager.

Throughout this article, we’ll explore what a social media dashboard can do for your business and its core features. By the end, you’ll have a clear idea of how to use one to achieve your social media goals and become one of those efficient managers who can easily juggle a seemingly endless workload. 

• What is a social media dashboard?
• Why a social media dashboard is beneficial?
• Core features of a social media dashboard

What is a social media dashboard?

A social media dashboard is a centralised tool that brings together key data from all your social media accounts. It gives you direct access to your social media networks, so you don’t have to log in and out of each account individually. In fact, you don’t even need to open a new tab. 

From here, a dashboard helps you track:

• Performance of your posts,
• Audience engagement and respond to it,
• Social media campaign results.

This makes it easier to plan, optimise, and demonstrate the impact of your social media efforts.

Whether you want to check in on a campaign or provide a quick update for a client, a powerful social media dashboard provides you with the information you need.

If you’re considering getting one, it's important to find a tool with the features you need. The best tool for you may not be ideal for everyone. 

For example, some providers offer social media management tools with advanced features and hundreds of integrations, but for a premium price.

On the other hand, if all you need is an intuitive dashboard with access to in-depth analytics and automation, you can probably find a better value alternative. 

Remember, a social media dashboard is meant to simplify social media management, streamline your workflow, and help you hit your targets. Overcomplicating things will result in the opposite. 

For example, Sendible's dashboard lets you get an overview of your social media campaigns. This way, instead of logging into every social media account and a Google sheet to manually find and track every single post under your campaign, you can get an entire overview of progress and performance in one place.

Why a social media dashboard is beneficial

So far, we’ve touched briefly on the benefits of using a social media dashboard. It can significantly improve your social media performance and consistency.

If you’re still on the fence about how big a difference-maker it could be for you, don’t worry. Having a healthy scepticism about digital marketing tools can be a good thing. 

We’ve outlined several direct benefits you can experience with a social media dashboard from the get-go to relieve your doubts. 

• Informed decision-making using real-time data: Instantly access up-to-date metrics, including engagement rates, follower growth, reach, impressions, and more. This enables businesses to make decisions with confidence and adjust strategies on the fly for optimal outcomes.

• Time-saving with increased efficiency: Automate tedious, repetitive tasks, such as evergreen content, monthly reports, or scheduled updates, giving you more time to focus on duties that warrant more time, like strategic planning or creative content development.
• In-depth performance analytics: With in-depth analysis reports, you can examine granular performance details. You can use the data to understand audience engagement, demographics, platform-specific trends, and other factors that drive results. 
• Consistent posting and branding: Scheduling tools, content previews, content calendars, and approval workflows help ensure consistency of scheduling and branding. By following the necessary steps with every piece of content, you can ensure that your brand’s voice, visual identity, and scheduling are consistent. 
• Improved engagement and faster response time: A social media dashboard like Sendible’s allows you to monitor comments, messages, and mentions from multiple networks in real-time. You can even prioritise certain engagement types to ensure they aren’t missed. This leads to faster response times and improved engagements, building stronger customer relationships and solving their issues promptly. 

• Better collaboration: Teams benefit from social media management tools through shared dashboards, joint workflows, approvals, and assigned tasks. Multiple users can access the same dashboard from anywhere, ensuring everyone is aligned and on the same page. 
• Enhanced ROI tracking: With a social media dashboard, you can track how specific campaigns contribute to key business outcomes, giving you a better indication of what is truly affecting the bottom line. Alternatively, you may do this for leads or brand awareness. This is extremely valuable when creating reports for stakeholders and clients. 

Core features of a social media dashboard

While we refer to a social media dashboard as a singular tool for managing your accounts and clients, different service providers offer unique setups.

In reality, a dashboard is not just one interface. It combines a range of features which play different roles in optimising your social media strategy and execution. 

The importance of the individual features will depend on your business's goals and priorities. Below, we break down Sendible’s leading platform, discussing its core features and how to use them to take your social media management to the next level. 

Manage multiple channels from one place

Sendible’s social media dashboard allows you to oversee and manage your social media accounts from a unified platform. All standard social media tasks can be consolidated into our intuitive and easy-to-navigate dashboard, eliminating the need to switch between different platforms, saving time, and reducing complexity. 

This feature is convenient for managing a single brand or multiple clients. Some standout features for juggling multiple channels include: 

• Cross-platform posting: Schedule and publish content for various social networks simultaneously. Access posted or scheduled content through an interactive calendar. 

• Priority inbox: View and respond to messages, comments, and mentions from all channels in one place, using Sendible’s Priority Inbox to improve engagement and response items. 
• Manage permissions: Not every user needs to access all functionality. With our custom user permission groups, you can decide who gets access to what.

Sendible is a significant aid to marketers and social media managers. The dashboard's centralisation makes it convenient and straightforward to manage complex, multi-channel campaigns. 

Manage high volumes of content without switching tabs

One of Sendible’s key features for social media managers and agencies is its ability to handle high volumes of content from one place. This doesn’t just mean publishing. With Sendible, you can plan, design, create, schedule, and publish your content for different social networks without the need for constantly switching apps. 

Sendible integrates with Google Drive, Dropbox, Canva, Pexels, Giphy, and other popular tools. Even if you require design for your content, you can do it through Sendible. The shared content libraries mean you can store and reuse visual assets and templates. 

Let’s expand on some of the specifics. 

• Bulk scheduling: Upload and schedule content for multiple posts on several platforms at once, using CSV imports or the Sendible calendar. This makes handling heavy campaigns less daunting. 

• Post previews: With post previews for all content, you can view how posts will appear on each platform before publishing. Previews can be accessed through the calendar and edited if necessary. This is a great way to spot errors or adjust the structure of your posts.
• Colour-coding: Sendible offers a simple but effective feature of colour-coding specific campaigns or topics, making it easy to find and monitor a variety of projects simultaneously.

Track and monitor campaigns

It’s impossible to nail all posts. With Sendible, you can turn content that didn’t hit the mark into valuable lessons. Our comprehensive tracking tools mean you can monitor the performance of your campaigns live, in real-time. 

Even a quick look at the dashboard can give you insights into what’s working, what needs improvement, and how your audience is reacting. Here are some more details on the tracking and monitoring features. 

• Engagement analysis: Sendible's engagement reports allow you to get an overview of engagement and your audience's behaviour in just one click.
• Campaign-level monitoring: Sendible allows you to tag campaigns. This means you can access and monitor multiple posts that are aligned with that specific campaign, giving you a broader scope of what’s happening, and simplifying quick analysis. 

• ROI measurement: With Sendible, you can easily UTM your links and track them through integrated Google Analytics to get a better grasp of your social media ROI.

Automate evergreen content

Sendible’s dashboard lets you schedule content in advance. Another useful feature is automated content distribution. 

Evergreen posts, such as branded or seasonal content, may be recycled to reappear at optimal intervals. You don’t have to waste time repeatedly posting the same thing. Rather, you can focus on other important tasks in the knowledge that your standard evergreen content is reaching your audience at the right times.

Other useful features you can consistently rely on include: 

• Smart queues: Schedule content in order, automating posting sequences for each campaign, ensuring there are no large gaps. 
• Custom repeat settings: Control how often evergreen posts are shared with options to tailor reposting times and frequencies based on the platform and audience. 

Leverage artificial intelligence (AI)

Sendible continually updates its service catalogue with new features, such as artificial intelligence. AI Assist is an AI-driven feature that helps you work smarter. Its main uses are writing copy and generating captions for posts, but it can also generate content suggestions. 

Again, this alleviates some of the heavy-lifting and time-consuming tasks that burden social media managers. 

In-depth performance analytics

Sendible offers advanced analytics, giving you a comprehensive view of social media performance. These differ from the real-time, live data that are also accessible through the dashboard. 

In-depth analytics offer a longer-term look at the numbers so you can better understand audience behaviour, measure campaign performance over time, and refine your strategy for more desirable results. 

• Customisable reports: Create tailored, white-label reports for clients and stakeholders. These reports can be automated containing the most important metrics for the individual.
• Trend analysis: In-depth analysis is the perfect way to spot long-term trends and determine the types of content that resonate best with audiences on each platform.   

How can Sendible help?

Social media has never been more demanding.

Staying on top of your content strategy, analysis, and engagement is a full-time job. However, you don’t need to waste time on repetitive and manual tasks.

With tools like Sendible, you can ensure your social media performances are optimised while reserving time and energy for bigger strategic responsibilities. 

We welcome new customers to try out our dashboard for free with a 14-day trial. Our team also offers full demonstrations with video overviews so you know exactly what to expect before you sign up.