Where do you view activity happening on your social media channels all in one place? A social media dashboard allows you to view a snapshot of your social media activity directly from one source.  This can save you a lot of time as you can see an overview of your social media activity.

Here are 4 tools that provide you with a dashboard view of your activities across many different channels.

1. Cyfe

Cyfe is an all in one dashboard that provides a suite of widgets for social media, analytics, marketing, sales, support and infrastructure.

For social media it currently supports widgets for Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Pinterest, Instagram and LinkedIn.

Price: There is a free version which allows you have 5 widgets on a dashboard.  The paid version is $19 per month for unlimited widgets.

Features

• 48 Widgets available to choose from (not all for social media), you can also create custom widgets if there is a widget you need that is not available
• Real time reports
• Data is archived so you can view historical reports
• TV mode – you can automatically rotate widgets on a big screen
• Custom reports – you can brand the reports and put your own backgrounds on them
• Public URL’s where you can share a read only version of your dashboard to anyone

Here are the widgets that are supported:

How it works

Once you register your account you just need to select the widget you want to add to your dashboard.

Depending on the widget you choose there is some configuration required.  In the following we define a title for the widget,  the Facebook account, Facebook page name and then we define the metric we want to display.  There are over 50 different metrics you can choose from in order to create your own social media dashboard.

You are then displayed your dashboard.  Here is a sample of 2 widgets on a dashboard (Google analytics and Facebook).

Overall Opinion

Cyfe is easy to use and visually appealing.  It has a broad selection of widgets available with a free option with 5 widgets.  It would be nice to have support for more widgets for social media. 

2. Sumall

Sumall is a cross platform analytics tool with support for 30 services.  It is currently provided for free with no limitations.  A premium version will be launched soon which will include a payment option.

Features

• Connects to 30 services
• Supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn,  Google+, Instagram, Foursquare, Tumblr, Google Blogger, WordPress and Google analytics.
• View side by side analytics e.g. view analytics for 2 Facebook pages side by side.

Here are the widgets it supports:

How it works

When you initially install you connect the platforms you want.  For example, if you want Google+ you select if you want your personal or business page.

One you connect the options for reporting are displayed in the menu on the left hand side.

Here is an example of a Facebook page.  You can display multiple graphs showing different statistics for the same Facebook page or you show graphs for different platforms together.  For example, have a look at Facebook fan page growth and Facebook traffic on Google analytics to see if there’s a correlation.

The user interface takes a bit of getting used to with SumAll and it would be useful if there were more options available for graphs for each platform supported.

3. Google Analytics Custom Dashboard

Google analytics is a free analytics program for your website.  There are some very useful social media analytics as part of this package where you can track social media traffic and track any conversions on this traffic.

But you can also set up custom dashboards that focus in on particular areas, for example, social media.

To set up a custom dashboard select the ‘New Dashboard’ area.

You can then add on any widgets you like related to social media.   You specify the type of each widget (e.g. Pie chart, graph etc) and  then configure the widget.

Here’s what part of a social media dashboard looks like:

After you build the dashboard you can drag and drop items on it to suit.  You can also add additional widgets at a later stage or split the dashboard into multiple dashboards focussed on specific areas.

If you don’t want to build the custom dashboard yourself there are some places on the web where you can get a dashboard and add it on to Google analytics.

Dashboard 61 – contains 12 widgets of data.

Koozai  have set up 7 dashboard templates and one of them is a social media dashboard.

Adding custom dashboards is straightforward.  You just select the dashboard and pick the option to add to the correct profile (i.e. you may have multiple profiles for different websites).

4. NetVibes

Netvibes is a similar dashboard to Cyfe, however, the free version focusses more on information than analytics.  For example, for the Facebook widgets you can view recent updates on Facebook and also submit updates to Facebook.

They have a large community that develops widgets so you have thousands of widgets to choose from.

The basic option for NetVibes is free.  You can pay $3.50 per month to get support and $499 if you want have custom social analytics and realtime alerts.

Features:

• Wide variety of widgets available which are provided by Netvibes or through the community that develops widgets.  Have a look at the left hand column which shows the variety of widgets that are available.

  

•  Real-time monitoring
• Personalization of apps.

Premium features includes:

• Universal search –  You can search through feeds and apps and produce a new widget with the results.  These results will be automatically updated.
• Smart tagging – After finding articles through universal search you can tag each article with your opinion and sentiment.
• Smart alerts – Get alerts based on activities you want to track

They have widgets for Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Instagram, Google analytics.

Summary of Social Media Dashboard Tools

The dashboards are a useful way to get an overview of what’s happening on social media.  With the right graphs in place you will quickly get an idea of how well things are going for you.  Do you use any of the tools above?  Are there other social media dashboards that you would recommend?

We would love to hear your thoughts.