Are You Using A Social Media Dashboard? 3 Reasons Why You Should Be

You’ve got two more tweets to send out promoting a new product, a whole queue of questions on your company’s Facebook page to answer, and you know your personal LinkedIn account has been pretty dormant lately. What do you do?

If your answer is to click over to each site, update, click, send, click… you’re doing it wrong.

There are plenty of tools out there that can make your social media life easier, and dashboards have got to be among the best. Here are three ways dashboards can take a little bit of that stress off your shoulders.

Reason #1: Dashboards can schedule your tweets

Wouldn’t it be nice to not have to log in to Twitter every time you wanted to send a tweet? Well, you don’t have to! With a dashboard, you can pre-write tweets and schedule them for later that day, week, month… any time!

Most dashboards have a calendar feature that lets you see when exactly all of your tweets, status updates and more are going live, so you know how active you accounts will be.

A word of caution when scheduling social media posts though: never automate interactions, and make sure someone is available to monitor your accounts at all times. Even though the tweets were scheduled, it shouldn’t mean you’re receiving any fewer interactions – and you want to be able to respond to your followers in kind!

Reason #2: Dashboards can help you manage multiple accounts

As we hinted to earlier, dashboards are a huge efficiency tool for many social media managers – and it’s mostly because you can plug in all of your social networks, and manage them from a single app.

Instead of logging in to your company’s customer service account to answer a complaint, then logging out, then logging in to your company’s main brand account to tweet a promotion, you can do all that (plus update your Facebook page, upload a video to YouTube…) from your dashboard.

Reason #3: Dashboards let you manage social media with your team

One of the best features of social media dashboards is their flexibility when it comes to multiple people managing a single account. If you have several people in charge of social media, you can give them all access to your dashboard and manage Tom’s morning tweets, Mary’s afternoon status updates and Rick’s on-going monitoring from one place.

Social media dashboards for you to try

Are you sold on dashboards yet? If not, give one a spin for yourself. Here are three of the best:

• HootSuite: One of the most popular dashboards out there started as a Twitter management tool, and has since branched out to become your one-stop-shop for social media analytics, management and scheduling
• TweetDeck: This dashboard is owned by Twitter, and doesn’t allow you to connect quite so many different networks as some of its competitors. Still, its functionality makes it a user favorite.
• Sprout Social: A business-oriented social media management dashboard, Sprout Social offers a wide range of features – but you’ll have to pay (after a 30 day trial period).