By Marcela De Vivo

An adept social media manager knows that no social platform or social signal is truly insignificant, which is why we often create multiple accounts on every platform that exists, or has the potential to become the “next big thing.” Currently sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ dominate the market, but collating data from these four sites alone can be a full-time job.

Every campaign has its own methods of tracking and analyzing data, but ultimately every social media manager longs for a tool that will not only allow you to aggregate various metrics in a convenient way, but also gives you the data you need to discern what is your most engaging content, how it applies to your target audience, and how it calls them to act.

Long no more–that tool does exist, in the form of social media analytics dashboards. Analytics dashboards are designed to organize information in an easy-to-access and comprehensible presentation. You can gain all the valuable statistics from every social media network, all in one place, along with the data that can help you measure the quality and effectiveness of your campaign, thereby increasing your overall productivity on social media.

With a number of widgets and add-ons, dashboards allow you to gain specific information without having to visit an endless amount of sites to access them. Managing your social media output requires a lot of legwork but dashboards will decrease the amount of time finding the data and giving you the time to work with it.

If you are a social media manager and you do not have a social media dashboard, this will revolutionize the way you do your work for five valuable and empowering reasons:

1. Time Management

It’s vital for a business or website to keep their finger on the pulse of social media, but this often requires having multiple campaigns running on multiple networks, which can be incredibly time consuming. Though the small actions of logging in, tracking activity, switching back and forth to compare metrics, and engaging with customers might only take a few minutes or even seconds each, those actions quickly rack up.

A social media dashboard like Google Analytics or Cyfe can greatly reduce the amount of time you spend because you have access to each network, and each network’s data. This gives you quick and simple answers to questions such as “what’s working” and “when were we the most effective?”

Besides having access to a variety of networks such as Facebook and Pinterest, you can also create multiple dashboards to control each campaign or client separately, if need be. And when it’s time to present reports to clients or to your manager, outputting the data is as simple as a quick export.

2. Visual Comparisons

With a dashboard, the easy aggregation allows you to see all of the statistics regarding a campaign, which can be displayed in a variety of graphs and charts (another great feature for reporting).

Image Courtesy of koozai.com

Along with the stunning amount of graphs, dashboards like Cyfe gives you the ability to track what works with customers such as the number of conversions, likes, re-tweets, etc. Another time saving tool for social media managers is that most of the brand management data on social media dashboards can not only be exported but also be transferred to a hard copy at the end of a time period

Dashboards simply give you the opportunity to monitor your reputation around the clock worldwide. Kristi Hines’ piece on Cyfe, Get your Business Analytics Fix in One Dashboard, goes in depth about the usefulness of dashboards and widgets in regards to your business (definitely worth checking out).

3. Collaboration

An essential feature of social media dashboards is the ease of sharing; this hands you the ability to collaborate with others in your company. Most dashboards empower you with a feature to share the information no matter what the distance is.

This not only makes it easy to work together with someone on a campaign but increases the effectiveness by giving them the opportunity to see all of the valuable aggregated data. Instead of spending time over the phone or e-mailing, your co-worker can simply just access the dashboard and have all of the data right in front of them.

4. Tracking Your Competitors

A very important quality to social media dashboards is the ability to track your competitors’ data. It’s time consuming enough tracking your own data, so why spend your valuable time tracking theirs? With a dashboard, however, you can monitor widgets that can show you their statistics on social media platforms just the same as yours, and that are just as easy to view and compare.

You can also install widgets to view their SEO data like their MozStats and view their Alexa rating. This gives you the information you need to compare where they stand in regard to your campaign without setting you back in terms of time and resources.

5. Not just for Social Sites

Managing social media doesn’t just stop at Twitter and Facebook. It is important to have access to all of the benefits that the internet has for business.

Image Courtesy of iacquire.com

Widgets that track your Google Adwords data along with AB testing give you the opportunity to see how customers engage with your business and allow you to track what is most appealing for them. Finance information from Paypal and Salesforce are all available, so you have access to invoices and balances from a variety of sources.

Stop wishing about a quick and easy social analytics dashboard and set yours up this week. Searching will help you find a myriad of tools to get you started.

How are you tracking your company’s data?

Marcela De Vivo is the CEO of Gryffin Media, an online marketing agency specializing in helping companies integrate their social media, paid, and content marketing efforts. She loves to research different ways of growing online, and sharing her knowledge. In her spare time, she’s a yoga and meditation junkie. Follow her on Facebook.