Social media is continuing to play a greater and greater role in the purchasing decisions we make. Numerous studies demonstrate the increased integration of social media engagement with buyer decision-making.
Social Media Influences Sales More Than Ever
Collective Bias conducted a survey among 14,000 respondents in US and indicated that as much as 70% of millennials base their buying decisions on recommendations they find on social media. Other studies report that 60% of consumers shopping in brick-and-mortar stores have been influenced by social media posts in some way.
For good reason, social media has become a potent channel for customer care and branding for modern businesses. Almost 80% of small businesses now use social media to grow their customer base and customer loyalty by helping them build and nourish brand awareness in the marketplace.
Like a well-placed “Open” sign hanging in a store window, social media conveys a powerful message about the presence and availability of a brand to its customers. It has also become the primary medium that people use to connect with a company to get help with a problem or issue about a product or service, according to the 2108 Sprout Social Index, surpassing phone and email methods(2).
Relevant, informative, and consistent social media marketing also serves to validate a brand’s presence in the marketplace. It conveys the message to consumers that the brand is responsive, staying current, and values active communication with consumers.
Still, Not Everyone’s On Board
Yet, even as social media efforts offer businesses such a high ROI, marketing managers are often short-changed the time they need to fulfill their potential.
As huge an impact as social media can have, efforts of community management (CM) and social media management (SMM) are often under-appreciated within many organizations.
Managers are often under-informed about what is and isn’t an effective social media strategy and what it takes to sustain an impactful social media profile.
So how can you take a quantum leap in efficiency, gain the rewards of agility and get the results you want from your social media efforts?
Online Dashboards Elevate Social Media Performance
Not surprisingly, in today’s data-driven business environment, leveraging your business data can elevate your social media efforts to grow your brand awareness, understand and respond to your audience, and build your brand.
One of the best solutions, often with plug-and-play accessibility, are online dashboards. They put your data at your fingertips, so you get the metrics you need on a visually-appealing and highly informative platform.
Online dashboards help businesses stay on top of and understand the metrics, trends, and performance results within their social media game plan. With immediate access to up-to-date and real-time data, you can monitor your social media tasks and campaigns and be able to see at a glance what’s performing well and what’s not.
From there, you can make more astute decisions to actualize your goals more quickly. Dashboards let you connect data from all corners of your business, so you see the bigger picture and glean insights from the aggregate of different data sets.
While vertical reporting tools can only provide one-dimensional insights, many online, cloud-based dashboards allow you to connect disparate data sets and platforms into a virtual data warehouse to give you a more comprehensive view of your social media performance. And gather much more refined, more accurate, and more actionable insights as a result.
They Save You Precious Time
Online dashboards that enable data refresh, means that you always have access to the most current data—presented to you in visually interesting and immediately understandable graphical formats like pie charts, linear performance charts, gauges, numeric displays, and more.
No matter if you share the insights in top-level business meetings or with your own teams, everyone will be able to understand the trends, observe the data behind the metrics, appreciate performance stand-outs, and more.
You can also save time by setting up automatic notifications when important thresholds—think followers, comments, and shares, to start—are reached. Respond more quickly to new developments and leverage the work you’ve done for better returns.
They Help You Know Your Audience
Online business dashboards let you find out quickly how your audience is interacting with your brand.
Which social media channels are most attenuated to your business?
Which ones are getting the most response from your community?
Who are your most engaged and loyal followers?
Do you want to make them Brand Ambassadors?
Let your online dashboard guide you on how to generate more engagement, grow your brand awareness, and increase your conversion rates. For example, LinkedIn premium can help you get loads of engaged prospect data, helping you to increase conversion rates through more detailed social media dashboards.
They Help You Share Your Successes With Your Boss
With your data presented with clarity, depth, and even flair, your social media dashboards will help upper-level execs appreciate your community and social media management efforts for real.
Show off your engagement stats. Inform about team performance standouts.
Make your point with ease, backed up by easily consumable data. It may go a long way to increase your social media cred.
KPIs Sharpen your Social Media Strategies
Online dashboards are at their best when they report insightful, relevant and actionable insights, and the best way to deliver them is with relevant key performance indicators (KPIs).
It can be virtually impossible to know for sure whether you’re making the best business decisions without the advantage of KPIs. When it comes to gaining control of your social media management, these are the KPIs that can help you monitor and maximize your reach, engagement, conversions, and customer loyalty.
KPIs to Monitor Your Reach
Your market reach helps you grasp how many people might have been exposed to your brand and who they are. It can give you an idea of the potential for engagement for your brand. These KPIs can help you begin to quantify your reach:
- Web traffic. It’s essential to understanding your social media impact to monitor how much traffic your social media campaigns drive to your website
- Follower count. As your number of followers, you can see how many people you’re actually reaching.
- Impressions. This quantity tells you how many times your posts appeared on social media. It differs from the number of users because one user might have multiple impressions. It gives you an idea of the activity around your brand.
KPIs to Monitor Engagement
Social media engagement KPIs tell you the types of engagement that your posts generate.
- Clicks
- Likes
- Shares
- Comments
- Mentions
KPIs to Monitor Conversion
- Sales Revenue
- Lead conversion rates
- Non-revenue conversions
KPIs to Monitor Customer Loyalty
- Cost per lead
- Issues resolved
- Customer lifetime value
The right reporting tools are making smart marketing managers even smarter.
Using online social media dashboards to leverage social media metrics and gain deeper insight into performance, helps to empower their activities and clarify the direction for future campaigns.
Monitor your social media success and other key business metrics with ClicData’s beautiful, easy-to-set-up, and easy-to-use data visualization software. See your KPIs in real-time, wherever you are, and manage your company more astutely and more effectively than ever.