The Social Media Marketing Campaign dashboard is based on the traditional business intelligence (BI) dashboard—a data visualization tool that displays the current status of metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) for an enterprise.

Dashboards consolidate and arrange numbers, metrics and sometimes Performance Scorecards (check out Part 2 of this post) on a single screen. They may be tailored for a specific role and display metrics targeted for a single point of view (or department). The essential features of a BI dashboard product include a customizable interface and the ability to pull real-time data from multiple sources.

An effective dashboard serves as a starting point from which corporate executives and their marketing team can get a sense of the big picture before digging deeper into data.  Features of an effective executive dashboard include:

• An intuitive graphical display that is thoughtfully laid-out and easy to navigate.
• A logical structure behind the dashboard that makes accessing current data easy and fast.
• Displays that can be customized and categorized to meet each user’s specific needs.
• Information from multiple sources, departments, markets or campaigns.

All these features apply in making the Social Media Dashboard such a great tool for obtaining quick reports on the progress of a Social Media Marketing Campaign.  Social Media Dashboard reporting enables marketers to migrate beyond reporting statistics into communicating KPIs that provide actionable insights into business performance.

Popular dashboard applications currently available on the market include:

• Commun.it (http://commun.it) for managing Twitter channel relationships.  Community Dashboard including graphs such as: Community Loyalty, Community Growth, Community Engagement Level, and New vs. Existing Member Visits.  The graphs are accompanied with a clear call-to-action indicators and KPIs (colored green, yellow and red, depending on the state). Community Reports functionality enables the user to view a community by engagement level, levels of desired customer service, engagement history and influence.

• Factualz (www.factualz.com) offers realtime social media monitoring dashboards with actionable insights to help in your social Web marketing, competitive analysis and client account growth.

• HootSuite (www.hootsuite.com) social media dashboard for managing social content and engagement on multiple networks with team workflow and statistics.  Recently added social analytics reporting tools provide a comprehensive view of statistics from Twitter, Facebook, Google and more from within a single tool. This real-time information should allow marketing teams to rapidly adjust tactics based on data rather than hunches, as well as more clearly understand the reasons for particular campaign results.  HootSuite’s Social Analytics consist of more than 30 individual report “modules” accessible through a re-designed launch bar. Users can select from a variety of modules in any combination to build custom reports, or for quick reporting, choose from a selection of pre-made report templates.

• MarketMeSuite (http://marketmesuite.com) is a Social Media Marketing Dashboard for small businesses.  Like HootSuite only more marketing and lead generation-oriented, MarketMeSuite was the first Twitter application to focus on proactive marketing and branding. It is highly prized by its subscribers who see it as more small business-focused alternative to TweetDeck or HootSuite.

• MashableMetrics (www.mashablemetrics.com ) provides custom, multi-channel, automated Web analytics dashboards. The collection, transformation and presentation of multi-channel data reporting is founded on the principles that data extraction should be just ten percent or less of the data analysis process and only when data is planned and procedural does it lead to action.

• Netvibes (www.netvibes.com) Social Pack is a suite of tools that adds “adaptive social analytics” to Netvibes’ Premium Dashboards. Social Pack offers a suite of live apps that each answers a different question with dynamic visualizations and interactive viewpoints covering: Who, What, Where, When and How.

• Social Report (www.socialreport.com) is a unified social and Web analytics dashboard and reporting platform to track social accounts, networks, websites, short links and blogs. It offers tools to help with discovery, marketing, conversion tracking and semantic analysis of social data, and the ability to post and track Social ROI related to specific campaigns. On the unified Social Report dashboard, all social, Web, short link and blog property performance is accessible. The best comparison would be to Google Analytics (GA). Just like you can track visitors, time on site, keywords, geography and many other aspects of Web performance using GA, with Social Report you can track membership, demographics, interests, geography, education, employment and many other aspects of your social space.

• Social Analytics (www.awarenesshub.com) from Awareness, Inc., a provider of on-demand social marketing management software (SMMS).  A user-friendly reporting solution for generating detailed analysis on social media marketing programs, the Social Intelligence Dashboard features report and dashboard templates that help users get started with sophisticated social marketing analysis.  Simple drag-and-drop functionality allows users to manipulate data like a pro, no coding required.

• Unilyzer (www.unilyzer.com)  Social Media Dashboard Unilyzer has a social media dashboard to unify Twitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts. The Unilyzer™ automatically retrieves marketing data and transforms it into the exact information you need. Unify and analyze your data with one tool.

Next:

Part II: Social Media Marketing Campaign Reporting – Scorecards

Contact Digital Eye Media for information on how to Create and Manage your Social Media Marketing Campaigns: P: (949) 900-3017; sales@digitaleyemedia.com.