You’re in a meeting with senior executives and stakeholders and they ask you to quantify your team’s performance across social channels and accounts. You also need to explain how your performance influences company goals. Sounds familiar?

You know raw social analytics is complex, and sharing it with people who have limited hands-on-the-keyboard social experience is ineffective. So, instead of getting granular, you provide them with a digestible overview of your most important KPIs. You tell a compelling data story that helps them visualize how your customer care, awareness and engagement efforts matter to your company’s big picture. You captivate your audience and prove the power of social.

How did you do this? Using a social media dashboard to glean vital insights from your data will help you successfully convey your team’s impact every time.

To help you get to this ideal scenario, we’re highlighting examples of social media dashboards you can use to illustrate the value of social media across your business.

What is a social media dashboard?

A social media dashboard is a centralized analytics tool that aggregates performance metrics from multiple social networks into a single view. These dashboards transform raw data from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn and TikTok into actionable insights that drive strategic decisions, prove ROI and streamline reporting for marketing teams.

A definition of social media dashboard that reads "Dashboards compile crucial social data in one place and empower you to automatically measure results so you can spend more time iterating on strategy, demonstrating impact and influencing decision making."

The importance of a strategic social media analytics dashboard

Strategic social media dashboards deliver measurable business impact. They transform complex social data into clear insights that drive faster decisions and stronger results.

Here are four benefits that transform your social media performance:

1. Easier decision-making with real-time data

A social media dashboard integrates real-time data across social platforms, which helps you to make informed decisions quickly. This immediacy helps you adapt your strategies in response to live customer feedback and market shifts.

2. Streamlined reporting and insights

Dashboards condense complex datasets into actionable insights and simplify reporting. They also make it easier to strategize around data and communicate findings to ensure stakeholders understand the impact of social media efforts.

3. Competitive edge through in-depth analytics

With features like competitive analysis and sentiment tracking, dashboards provide a deeper insight into your performance and that of your competitors. This helps you maintain a competitive edge and fine-tune social media marketing strategies.

4. Optimized ROI

Dashboards highlight the most successful campaigns and tactics, helping businesses allocate resources to optimize marketing spend and improve your ROI.

What insights should your social media dashboard software include?

Your social media dashboard strategy succeeds when it aligns with specific business goals. Different objectives require different approaches.

Essential dashboard categories include:

  • Brand awareness tracking: Monitor reach, impressions and share of voice
  • Engagement analysis: Measure interactions, comments and community growth
  • Customer care metrics: Track response times and resolution rates
  • ROI measurement: Connect social efforts to business outcomes

To help determine the specifics you should include in your dashboard, ask yourself these six questions:

  • What is the goal of this dashboard? (Example: demonstrate positive changes in brand reputation)
  • Which metrics matter most to achieving this goal? (Example: sentiment)
  • Who is the audience and how much do they know about the topic? (Example: CMO and R&D)
  • Which channels need to be measured? (Example: Facebook, Instagram and Twitter)
  • What is the duration of time needed to effectively measure change? (Example: one month)
  • How do we compare to competitors? (Example: competitive analysis and hashtag monitoring)

Ultimately, you should have multiple social media dashboards for different stakeholders and purposes. For example, one for tracking monthly changes in brand reputation and sentiment, as seen in the example above. Another for sharing quarterly customer care productivity. By using a platform like Sprout Social, you can access and create custom social media dashboard templates that save you time and deliver presentation-ready dashboards for different business segments.

Best practices for effective social media dashboard design

Effective dashboards tell compelling stories through strategic design and purposeful data selection.

Follow these design principles:

  • Know your audience: Executives need high-level ROI metrics, while social teams need granular performance data
  • Prioritize clarity: Group related metrics together and use visual hierarchy to highlight key insights
  • Connect to outcomes: Every metric must answer “So what?” and tie directly to business objectives
  • Embrace simplicity: Clean layouts with strategic white space prevent information overload

Social media dashboard templates to use across your organization

Here are six types of social media dashboard templates designed to breakdown sophisticated reporting and help refine your data-driven strategy.

Social media engagement dashboard

Social media engagement is a barometer of how much your audience interacts with your content. When examining engagement metrics across months or years, a dashboard with a birds’ eye view helps you identify performance trends in your content strategy. With these insights, you can continuously replicate your successes and iterate on your least popular content.

  • Goal: Determine if your content resonates with your audience
  • Metrics: Impressions, engagements, link clicks, ad spend and conversions
  • Audience: Social media team and other stakeholders who influence content direction
  • Channels: Cross-channel or channel-specific
  • Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Here are a few examples of Sprout Social‘s social media engagement dashboards that give you the tools to proactively grow your audience and repeatedly test your content direction.

  • Profile Performance Report provides a high-level aggregation of analytics so you get a pulse on the performance of your social profiles. With this report, you can view Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube and TikTok metrics to better understand the impact of your social efforts.
A screenshot of the Facebook Summary in Sprout's custom reports. This view shows the Facebook performance summary where key metrics are highlighted and a graph displaying Facebook publishing behavior
  • The Post Performance Report helps you analyze your published content down to the individual post and understand its performance with your audience. It provides a unified view of your post performance across all social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and TikTok.
Sprout's Post Performance Report, which shows your top performing content across all of your social channels, individually or all together.
  • Our Cross-Network Paid Performance Report consolidates paid campaign-level data from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. From the Overview tab, you’ll see a summary of your paid performance, impressions, engagements, web conversions, video views and a breakdown of key performance metrics by channel.
A screenshot of Sprout's Paid Facebook and Instagram Performance tool which demonstrates key metrics like total spend, impressions, CPM, clicks, CPC and paid impressions by day.

Brand awareness dashboard

Brand awareness requires continuous effort and frequent pulse checks. Use data stories to determine your reach, earned media value and share of voice.

  • Goal: Analyze rates of target audience recognition and awareness
  • Metrics: Impressions, reach, engagements, mentions, earned media value and sentiment
  • Audience: Teams across marketing, including social media
  • Channels: Cross-channel
  • Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Sprout’s Listening tools help you tap into global social conversations to extract actionable insights that improve brand health and fuel brand awareness. With Sprout’s Listening dashboards, you can track conversations concerning your brand to illuminate consumer attitudes, gain visibility into customer experience and sentiment, conduct competitive analysis and stay up to date with trends in your industry.

A screenshot of Sprout's Performance Summary tool which demonstrates key metrics (like volume, engagements and impressions) related to a Listening Topic.

As many social media managers will tell you, achieving organic awareness and reach on social media is harder than ever. At Sprout, our team uses employee advocacy to breakthrough and track our success with brand awareness dashboards in our Employee Advocacy platform.

Here are two examples of employee advocacy dashboards we use on a monthly and quarterly basis:

  • Sprout’s Advocacy General Report provides an overview of our latest activity. The report analyzes the number of active stories, total shares and shares across each network, and how that translates into potential reach and earned media value. As you scroll, you’ll see sharing trends, the highest volume of sharing activity and overall story performance, top users by shares and top users by potential reach.
A screenshot of the general report available in Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social.
  • Sprout’s Advocacy Content Report dives deeper into data gleaned from your active content. You’ll see how many shareable or internal stories were active each day along with a comparison to the previous month. The Content Breakdown chart provides stats on shareable and internal content including days, views, shares, engagement and potential reach for each Story
A screen Employee Advocacy Content Report

Social competitive analysis dashboard

Tracking your competition on social media gives you essential insights to make strategic decisions. Keeping an eye on competitors helps you understand how well you do in comparison and helps you to set benchmarks. A social competitive analysis dashboard combines market share, competitor activity and audience engagement to help you gain a competitive edge.

  • Goal: Gauge competitive position and strategy effectiveness
  • Metrics: Market share, competitor post frequency, engagement rates and sentiment analysis
  • Audience: Strategic planners and marketing executives
  • Channels: Multiple platforms for comparative analysis
  • Cadence: Monthly and quarterly updates

With Sprout’s competitive analysis and social listening tool, you’ll see how well your competitors do on social media. You can compare how often they post, how many people interact with their posts and how many followers they gain.

Sprout's competitive performance dashboard showcases how well competitors are performing on social media in terms of posting cadence, engagement rate and follower growth.

Social customer care dashboard

Customer care is an essential function of social media. A social customer care dashboard measures, benchmarks and analyzes your team’s efforts, and reveals any critical opportunities to improve customer support. This dashboard is especially important for enterprise brands who typically have larger teams managing an influx of incoming requests across multiple accounts.

  • Goal: Provide visibility into customer care team performance
  • Metrics: Response rate, action rate, average time to action and total actioned messages
  • Audience: Customer care/support teams, sales, marketing and product development
  • Channels: Cross-channel inboxes (Pro tip: Sprout’s Smart Inbox unifies all incoming messages and mentions into a single stream)
  • Cadence: Monthly, quarterly and yearly

A customer care dashboard will help you illuminate how many messages your brand receives, your response rate and your average response time, like Sprout’s Inbox Activity Report demonstrates

Sprout's Inbox Activity Report shows total messages received, actioned messages, action rate and average time to action. The report also illustrates changes in Inbox volume over time.

Business intelligence dashboard

A Business Intelligence Dashboard helps to improve your social media marketing strategy by viewing consumer interactions across multiple channels. This dashboard aggregates data and offers in-depth analytics to help you understand how your social media campaigns are performing in relation to business-wide objectives and social media KPIs.

The dashboard combines different data sources, like social media stats and CRM info, to thoroughly examine customer behaviors and preferences. This helps you tweak your strategies to reach the right people with the right messages at the right times. It also helps you optimize your marketing spend by showing which campaigns and channels drive the highest ROI.

The business intelligence dashboard’s key features include tracking user engagement, conversion rates and customer journey patterns from initial contact through conversion. This level of detail provides you with the data to craft more personalized and effective marketing strategies.

  • Goal: Track the customer journey across digital touchpoints (including social)
  • Metrics: Customized to meet your goals. Examples include engagements per network/per state, ad impressions and email CTR
  • Audience: Executives and stakeholders
  • Channels: Cross-channel
  • Cadence: Quarterly and yearly

As Sprout’s Tableau BI Connector displays, you gain valuable insights by combining the power of social data with other business channels into one dashboard. This ensures social data and insights are included in your 360-degree view of your customers—proving the value social brings to your business.

A screenshot of Sprout data integrating with Tableau. The dashboard shows engagements per social network and per state. It also demonstrates social custom engagement rates, banner ad impressions and email clickthrough rates.

Executive dashboard

Most executives aren’t immersed in the world of social media on a frequent basis. Metrics that are meaningful to you and your team miss the mark when communicating with the C-suite. As a result, you might struggle to secure buy-in and investment to take your social efforts to the next level.

For best results, create customized reports for leadership that bridge knowledge gaps at the executive level and translate the raw data into a narrative that resonates with anyone in leadership. Create an executive summary of your most compelling social media reports to convince even the most skeptical executives about the impact social has on your business.

  • Goal: Deliver clear evidence of the social team’s impact
  • Metrics: Customized to each executive. Examples include share of voice, potential reach, earned media value, customer care productivity and competitor analysis data
  • Audience: Leadership and teams across marketing, including social media
  • Channels: Cross-channel
  • Cadence: Weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly

Use Sprout’s My Reports feature to create custom reports to easily track your most valued social data. Choose which metrics are included to evaluate performance based on your specific business goals.

How to create a social media dashboard

To set up your social media dashboard, follow these steps to quickly review and report on your strategy, and highlight your team’s performance.

Vertical flowchart of the steps to creating a social media dashboard, starting with determine purpose and audience, then decide which kind of dashboard to create, then gather the metrics and ending with share with stakeholders.

1. Determine purpose and audience

The first step toward creating a social media dashboard is figuring out its purpose. What goal is this dashboard trying to achieve? Who will it reach? How familiar are they with the topic? Clearly define your purpose and audience before doing anything else.

2. Decide which kind of dashboard to create

Decide which kind of dashboard best fits your needs. Revisit the six social media dashboard types mentioned above for inspiration. Choose a dashboard with relevant metrics that align with your goals and demonstrate social’s value to stakeholders. Be mindful of your audience and their social media experience level when deciding how detailed your dashboard should be.

3. Gather the metrics

Data collection determines your dashboard’s effectiveness. Start by identifying which networks need measurement and the timeframe for meaningful results.

Sprout Social automates this entire process. Our platform aggregates data from all major social networks, processes it through AI-powered analytics, and generates presentation-ready dashboards that save hours of manual work.

4. Share with stakeholders

Transform raw figures into riveting dashboards and data visualizations. Use key data points, complementary graphs and your expert analysis to give stakeholders a visual depiction of your team’s progress.

After creating your first dashboard, repeat the first three steps for each dashboard you need. Keep momentum going by updating your dashboards on a weekly, monthly or quarterly basis and sharing them with stakeholders often.

Streamline your analytics with Sprout’s social media dashboard

Social media dashboards convert your cumbersome social data into influential stories that are easy to absorb. You’re able to articulate your social ROI to stakeholders across the org by breaking down complexity and clearly communicating your findings.

Start your free trial to access Sprout’s full library of social media dashboard templates.

Frequently asked questions about social media dashboards

What metrics should I prioritize in my first social media dashboard?

Focus on fundamentals that align with your primary goals: reach and impressions for awareness, engagement metrics for community building, or response rates for customer care. Start simple and add complexity as you prove initial value.

How often should I update my social media dashboard data?

Update frequency aligns with your goals: real-time data for campaign management, weekly or monthly for executive reporting. Consistency matters more than frequency.

Can I customize social media dashboard templates for different business needs?

Yes, customization is essential for effective dashboards. Sprout Social’s Report Builder lets you create tailored templates for different teams, campaigns and business objectives.

How do I share dashboards with executives unfamiliar with social media?

Focus on business storytelling over raw metrics. Use clear visualizations and frame insights around revenue impact and business goals rather than social media jargon.

What’s the difference between a dashboard and individual platform analytics?

Individual platform analytics show siloed, single-platform performance while social media dashboards unify data across all platforms for comprehensive strategy insights and cross-platform comparisons.