5 Tools to Create an Effective Social Media Management Dashboard
Social media marketing has become a key part of business success. However, it can be too much work to deal with, because you need to be in a constant fight for attention on various available social media platforms at a time. Being on social media isn’t just about talking to potential customers. It’s also necessary for a healthy reputation, understanding your customers and building your content marketing around them.
No wonder social media is considered the toughest job in marketing.
Large, established businesses often decide to hire staff to handle social media management, but the smaller businesses with restricted budgets may not be able to afford this. That’s when the question of how to manage all your social media channels without the support of a team arises. This is where a social media dashboard comes in.
What is a social media dashboard?
A social media dashboard (SMD) is the solution to your social media management needs. It syncs social media accounts in one place and provides all relevant analytics, so there’s no need for you to visit each account separately for this information. A good SMD will have support for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google, at least.
Here are some of the top social media management dashboards:
Hootsuite
Boasting of over 6 million users and thirteen supported languages, Hootsuite is one of the best-known social media management dashboards out there. It makes it to the best-marketing-tools lists again and again. After syncing your social media with the suite, you can create “streams” as columns, adding tabs for relevant social media to each group of streams.
It also has an app directory where you can download third-party apps that you may need. If you’re working alone on the suite and you’re using no more than three social profiles, it’s free to use. If you’re working with a team member, you pay a minimum of $9.99, and you get up to 50 social media profiles.
Gremlin Social
Just like with Hootsuite, this one is also free for the smallest amount of profiles, groups, users, feeds, etc. Prices go up as the numbers of each increase.
Gremlin lets you do an advanced search on Twitter and add LinkedIn groups, although it only supports the top three platforms for now. Goals, link tracking, reporting, and translation service are some of the features offered by this social media dashboard.
Cyfe
Cyfe is more than a social media dashboard; it’s a complete business analytics tool. You can choose a Forever Free plan with limited features or cough up $19/month to get unlimited access to everything. This figure drops to $14/month if you’re making a full annual payment at once.
Cyfe has widgets for web analytics, blogging, email, sales and finance, SEO, social media, monitoring, and advertising. Each widget offers services that can be synced with the suite. If you’re thinking bigger than just social media management, then Cyfe might just be the option for you.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social probably has the easiest sign-up process of the options on this list. You’re not asked for credit card details, and you get a 30-day free trial before you are prompted to pay, so you get the chance to see if it’s the right fit for your needs.
You can sync Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Feedly and Google accounts with the platform. One neat feature that I particularly enjoyed was the option to set up brand keywords easily for social media monitoring.
Sprout Social is a bit expensive, and even with simply paid plans, you get a small number of profiles to work with. An individual plan costs at least $59/month, and the pricing goes up further for larger plans.
Sendible
Sendible is excellent for scheduling future social media posts and bringing all your interaction on various social media to one place – including SMS marketing and emails.
Getting started, you may get the feeling that you’re using an email client instead of a social media dashboard. There is the option to create and publish posts to your WordPress blog, Blogspot, or Tumblr. Sendible offers a 30-day free trial, so you can learn the ropes and figure out how the platform works before they ask you to make a payment.
After the 30-day period, you have to purchase a plan to continue using the service. The paid plans start at $39.99/month with 40 available services, 2 branded reports, and 2 team members allowed. Larger, more expensive plans are also available for power users. These various social media dashboards will help organize your business profiles and make social media more efficient.
