How many social media accounts do you have?
If your answer more than one, you could use a social media dashboard.
In a survey from Yesmail, 91% of retail brands claimed they manage at least 2 or more social channels for one brand alone. Since growing one profile already eats up our time, effort and money, then imagine the headache of running 2 or more.
You can delegate the job to someone because social media management is a high paying job now. Or you can simply get a social media dashboard.
A social media dashboard lets you manage multiple social media accounts easier.
No need to log on separately to your Facebook, Instagram, Google+, Twitter and LinkedIn profiles, you just need to open 1 tool instead of 5 networks.
When you can see everything on all your social media accounts at a glance, you save time and your sanity. Or by syncing all your social media accounts in one dashboard, you can run and monitor them in one place.
So, the next important question is which one tool will you use? There are tons of efficient and time-saving social media dashboard choices today, but for all our sakes let’s explore the 5 best options out there. One has to be the right fit for you.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite started in 2008 and now has more than 15 million users who rely on their dashboard.
Signing up is fast and easy and you can try individual, professional and team plans for free. Once you sign in, Hootsuite will guide you through the basics of connecting your networks and adding “streams”.
Streams are your social media activities you can monitor such as your Facebook timeline, twitter mentions and wall posts from other social media channels. Meaning you can choose the streams you want on different platforms.
The Dashboard is simple and organized and controls are neatly laid out on the left side, across the top, to the right and below the work area.
But the social media dashboard isn’t just the simple feature on Hootsuite.
With this tool, you can easily schedule unlimited messages across all your social networks.
Engaging with your followers is much easier with a clear overview of every message, comments or mention about you that you can quickly respond to.
Finally, this is also a one-stop shop for social media analytics, team collaboration and social listening.
Recently, Hootsuite has added user reviews into its social media dashboard by integrating reviews from ReviewTrackers so you can see and act on reviews next to your social posts.
This added feature is on top of over 35 social networks and 100s of apps you can seamlessly connect to thanks to Hootsuite.
While Hootsuite is generous with free trials and free individual use for up to 3 social profiles, you need to shell out more for larger plans. The professional plan allows you to run 10 social profiles for 1 user at $19 per month while team plan offers 20 social profiles for 3 users at $99 a month.
That’s why according to PC Mag, cost is one of the cons of Hootsuite.
Where extra features can be pricey for SMBs and the most advanced functionalities are best enjoyed with enterprise plans.
Cyfe
Cyfe is the all-in-one business intelligence dashboard, as they already say.
When they say business dashboard you can see a full picture of your business analytics and online activities in one dashboard.
That’s beyond your average social media dashboard. For business owners, this means an easy way to monitor and share vital business data and analytics from a single place.
Signing up is free and easy then you can command your business here in a matter of minutes.
All for just $19 per month ($14 per month if paid annually).
Cyfe is ideal for all business sizes who value data at the heart of their business.
That includes common social media data that Cyfe can integrate with from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and so on.
“Cyfe includes a ton of out of the box integrations to third-party services like Google Analytics, Facebook, Shopify, Salesforce, MailChimp, Stripe, and more. You can also bring in your own data easily with custom widgets.” Deven Patel, Founder of Cyfe.com said on Quora.
Aside from social media, you can customize widgets for the following purposes:
- Advertising
- Blogging
- Monitoring
- Sales and Finance
- SEO
- Web analytics
Another advantage of having a Cyfe Data dashboard is what you do with that data. Perhaps you’d like to share it to your boss partner or employees. Cyfe lets you save or share data in common file formats.
But the best thing about Cyfe? It comes with a plan that is forever free and upgrading comes cheap.
For the free subscription, you can only monitor a maximum of 5 widgets on 1 dashboard. You can upgrade for the very affordable price of $19/month and get access to an unlimited number of dashboards, widgets, and users, along with more features such as unlimited historical data, data exports, full customization, TV Mode, and sharing capabilities.
Sendible
When you want a social media dashboard that makes it easy to engage with the audience, schedule future posts and track your brand performance in one roof, Sendible makes a lot of sense.
On the inside, your Sendible dashboard looks like a simple email inbox but this social media dashboard also includes reports and analytics to measure your social media efforts.
Scheduling content is as easy as drag and drop as Sendible lets you connect to top Social Network sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and more.
Premium subscribers can even compose and publish blogs directly to WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger.
You can do a 30-day free trial because Sendible doesn’t provide you with any free accounts after the period lapses. So you have to provide your credit card details although you can cancel, upgrade or downgrade anytime.
Prices start at $49/month for growing brands that includes up to 20 services for 1 user. Advanced plan costs $199/mo. That includes 100 services for 4 users. Pro plan is at $499/month with access to 300 services for 10 users.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social covers every must-haves of an efficient social media dashboard—management of multiple social media accounts, social media calendar, campaign and keywords monitoring, analytics and collaboration tools for teams.
The single stream inbox allows you to have a birds-eye view of all your messages. Teams also have the option to see the actions taken on emails, customize the tags in every message and share the workload.
It’s important to queue and publish messages tailored to each social network and social Sprout’s ViralPost tool help point you to the right direction by suggesting the best times and frequency to post on each social platform.
Since analytics has always been at the core of every dashboard, Sprout Social’s in-depth reporting tools don’t come short either. In that simple dashboard, you can see which posts get the most engagement and which posts are not generating results.
This is one dashboard that is able to tell you that. It integrates with the most commonly loved networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkIn, Google+ and also tools like UserVoice, Bitly, Google Analytics, Feedly and Zendesk.
Since Sprout Social is really geared for business, it plans start at a premium for $99/month to $149 for Corporate plans and $249 for enterprises. But the cost can rise depending on the features you add and the users you need.
So this may not be the best option for startups who want to keep tabs on their budget.
Buffer
If you want the simplest and friendliest dashboard around then Buffer is for you.
The free trial alone gives you much leverage as it allows you to sync to major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google.
When you log in, what you’ll notice right away is the clean interface that is very easy on the eyes despite its functionality.
One of the best highlights of Buffer is the Suggestions tab that gives you an idea what to share with your followers in various categories.
You can even manage your social media groups and pages without linking your personal profile.
Finally, the best thing about Buffer is that you can try it for free or go premium for a measly price of $10 per month!
That’s $10 for managing all your social media accounts, scheduling unlimited posts in advance across all social platforms and tracking the performance with easy to understand analytics, all in a superb crowd favorite.
Bonus Tool: Healthinomics
What’s the use of all social media dashboards around when you have no outstanding images to queue!
When it comes to saving time, effort and tons of money, don’t ignore the power of Healthinomics which offers one of the largest database of ready-to-use images for social media that you can just brand as your own, and share as you please in any social media dashboard.
Choose high-quality images from different inspirational and educational categories in health and wellness.
Healthinomics not only grows your following on social media, it helps grow your business too as it generously gives a lot of freebies whether you subscribe or not. Plus, a $20 starting plan can go a long way to engage your leads.
Key Features To Look For In a Social Media Dashboard
Finally, with all these advanced features screaming for our attention we only need 5 key features in every dashboard:
1. Content scheduling
2. Campaign monitoring
3. Team collaboration
4. Helpful analytics
5. The ability to manage multiple accounts
The top 5 social media dashboards in here meet these criteria but in the end your needs matter most. Will the dashboard be for social media management alone? How many users are you considering?
Do you run a team who need a tool to collaborate better? Also, does this fit in your overall marketing budget?
Every option presented here has a free trial period. Try each one and find out which is best for you. It’s an automated tool designed to make your social media life a lot easier. If you can try it for free, you’ve got nothing to lose.
Get these ultimate freebies over at Healthinomics and check out our stunning collection of high-quality images guaranteed to engage your audience and explode your social media growth!
About The Author: SocialOmm
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