http://calendar.yahoo.com
Note: Google and Yahoo! require you to set up an account before you can use their calendars.
Creating a social media dashboard
Your social media marketing efforts may ultimately involve many tasks: Post to multiple venues; use tools to distribute content to multiple locations; monitor visibility for your company on social media outlets; and measure results by using several analytical tools. Rather than jump back and forth among all these resources, you can save time by using a graphical dashboard or control panel.
Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 4-1: Using Yahoo! Calendar, you can easily schedule your social media activities.
Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 4-2: On the Google Calendar, you can provide specifics for a marketing task by modifying an event detail window.
Like the dashboard of a car, a social media dashboard puts the various required functions at your fingertips in (you hope) an easy-to-understand and easy-to-use visual layout. When you use this approach, the customized dashboard provides easy access in one location to all your social media accounts, tools, and metrics. Figures 4-3 and 4-4 show several tabs of a customized Netvibes (www.netvibes.com/en) dashboard — one for social media postings and another for tools.
Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 4-3: This mock-up of a social media dashboard from Netvibes gathers the user’s various social media services on the Social Media Choices tab.
The items on your primary dashboard may link to other application-specific dashboards, especially for analytical tools and high-end enterprise solutions; those application dashboards are designed primarily to compare the results of multiple social media campaigns.
Table 4-2 provides a list of dashboard resources, some of which are generic (such as My Yahoo!) and others, such as Netvibes and Hootsuite (see Figure 4-5), which are specific to social media.
Before you try to build a dashboard, list all the social media sources, services, and reports you want to display, along with their associated URLs, usernames, and passwords. It will help if you indicate whether services are interconnected (for example, note whether you’re using a syndication service to update multiple social media at the same time) and how often statistical reports should be updated for each service (hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly).
Courtesy of Watermelon Mountain Web Marketing: www.watermelonweb.com
FIGURE 4-4: The Tools & Stats tab of this mock-up Netvibes dashboard displays tools for distributing, monitoring, searching, and analyzing data.
TABLE 4-2 Social Media Dashboard Resources
| Name | URL | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Hootsuite |
www.hootsuite.com
|
Free, customizable dashboard for social media; paid option available |
| MarketingProfs |
www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2010/3454/how-to-create-your-marketing-dashboard-in-five-easy-steps
|
Instructions for customizing a dashboard |
| MeetEdgar |
https://meetedgar.com
|
A categorized library with smart scheduling; starts at $19/month |
| My Yahoo! |
http://my.yahoo.com
|
Free, customizable Yahoo! home page |
| Netvibes |
http://netvibes.com
|
|
