Most social media dashboards suck. Too often, a dashboard is so filled with “vital” social media metrics that it buries the ones that matter the most to a brand or alternately relies on so few metrics that it becomes a pupu platter of familiar, yet meaningless numbers. With so many social media analytics tools out there promising to measure everything under the sun, how do you know that you’re keeping track of all the critical metrics that you’re supposed to be measuring and discarding all the “nice to have”, but largely unnecessary, ones?
The Car Dashboard
When one thinks about a dashboard, the first thing that most people think of is a car dashboard. Car dashboards have changed over the years, of course, and include such features as outdoor and indoor temperature, average gas mileage, compass, seatbelt warning light, etc. But at its essence, a car dashboard includes an odometer, a speedometer, a coolant temperature gauge, a fuel gauge, and a tachometer: collectively considered the most essential instruments in the dashboard. These instruments measure distance traveled, current speed, coolant temperature, amount of remaining fuel and rotation speed of the wheels, respectively.
For a complex machine like a car, it’s pretty amazing that those 5 instruments can tell you exactly how your car is performing, more or less.
At its core, the car dashboard, as a whole, serves to dynamically visualize to the driver the current state and health of the car. It would be foolish to think that one could drive for long using merely the speedometer, for example, to guide your journey, or simply the odometer, for that matter. One could overheat the engine or run out of gas without the slightest hint that such an event was imminent. It’s possible, however, that one could do just fine for a while. One might have gotten good at estimating how far one could go before filling up the gas tank or how fast one is going without breaking the speed limit. But for an activity that kills 113 drivers a day in America, driving with as many essential instruments at your disposal could be the difference between life and death.
The Social Media Dashboard
Similarly, most social media dashboards get it wrong because they include some – but not all – of the instruments necessary to run and optimize a successful social media department. Many social media managers think that they are doing fine with the metrics and measures they currently measure, rationalizing approaches with statements like, “I measure what I can” or “at least I’m measuring something” without ever fully realizing why they are measuring those things in the first place. As a result, social media marketers find it difficult not only to justify their role and need for budget, but also to play a meaningful part in the marketing mix, hampered by legitimacy and credibility issues. Ironic, because social media marketing is the most measureable marketing channel that has ever existed. If your social media dashboard is not telling you exactly how your efforts in social media are contributing to your business objectives, you’re just not trying hard enough.
The Engagement “Sweet Spot”
Social media is completely ingrained into the daily lives of your customers and they are adapting to the myriad ways that marketers are trying to reach out to them. Brands constantly seek the “sweet spot” to engage with customers and prospects in meaningful dialogue to reap the benefits of all the time, energy and investment spent on social media efforts.
To ultimately reach the “sweet spot” with your customers, you’ll need a dashboard that will report all necessary metrics that inform you, in real time, on progress towards stated social media objectives. The best social media marketers are the ones capable of adapting to information presented by ramping up or down on engagement tactics or adjusting the engagement strategy outright, while shifting budget, resources and time allocations.
So the first question to ask yourself is when building a dashboard is, “what are the business objectives you are trying to achieve through your social media marketing efforts?”
Social Media Business Objectives
From my experience, most brands tend to have these objectives (whether they know it or not), although there are many more:
- Branding
- Funneling Traffic to Purchase
- Fostering Customer Loyalty
- Delivering Customer Service
Depending on what a brand is selling, it might adopt one or more of these objectives. For example, a large retailer like Walmart might aim to adopt all of these objectives while a brand like Red Bull might focus more on branding and customer loyalty.
Whatever objectives one adopts, the path towards credibility starts with orienting measurement of objectives to business goals using impartial, transparent and accountable measures.
More importantly, it’s vital to limit what you measure so that the dashboard is a succinct and clear indicator of progress toward defined business objectives, while delivering diagnostic insight and predictive foresight in order to stay nimble. In other words, if one’s dashboard doesn’t deliver actionable insight into past activity and prognostic information about future plans, your dashboard is merely going to be a collection of numbers, causing one to celebrate when certain numbers go up and to lament certain numbers going down.
In my next post, I’ll lay out precisely the types of metrics and measures one should keep an eye on to track whether you are achieving your social media marketing goals.
