Imagine driving a car with no speedometer, no fuel gauge and no warning lights. The car might still function, but without those critical indicators, it would only be a matter of time before you run out of gas, blow a tire or get pulled over. Just like a car, businesses using Twitter need a dashboard that makes crucial information easily accessible and actionable.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an agency working with multiple brands or an enterprise handling dozens of accounts, it’s crucial to have something that covers all the bases. With Sprout’s Twitter dashboard, businesses can publish, engage, collaborate and analyze their efforts all in one place.
What is a Twitter Dashboard?
Back in 2016, Twitter made big waves when it released its own tool, aptly named Twitter Dashboard. As a free tool for small businesses or individual users, it’s great at providing a quick snapshot of Twitter basics like top Tweets, engagements, impressions, new followers and a few other metrics.
As an official Twitter partner, Sprout Social has a robust Twitter dashboard that elevates those basics and expands reporting, publishing and management capabilities for businesses of all sizes.
For businesses and agencies managing multiple Twitter profiles, creating a dashboard is a necessity as it makes all your data and messages accessible from a single location.
The best Twitter dashboards help your business and social media team work more efficiently and effectively. Whether you’re interested in growing your follower count, gathering feedback or measuring how your audience reacts to a new, humorous voice, there’s a number of ways Sprout’s Twitter dashboard will help.
Reporting and analytics
According to the 2019 Sprout Social Index, 39% of marketers say they struggle to demonstrate the value of social across their organization. With Sprout’s powerful Twitter analytics capabilities baked into the dashboard, social media professionals can track KPIs, measure social ROI and prove the value of their efforts with ease.
Twitter analytics compiles all the behaviors and actions audiences take when they come across your posts or profile–the clicks, follows, likes, expands and more–and breaks down that data to help you analyze performance and refine your strategy.
In Sprout’s Twitter Profiles view, users get a high-level snapshot of their data broken down into audience growth, outbound publishing behavior, top posts, impressions and engagement. If you manage multiple profiles, you can view data for all profiles at once, or narrow it down to one at a time.
Understand your audience on a deeper level
The first step in creating a successful campaign is getting to know your audience. Though you may have an idea of who your audience is, there is social data you can pull to get a deeper understanding.
The way your brand communicates with a 54-year-old male will most likely be different than how you would with a 20-year-old female. In Sprout’s Twitter analytics dashboard, users can review their audience demographics by age and gender and leverage that to tailor Tweets accordingly.
Rather than make assumptions about what type of content resonates with your audience, Sprout users can drill into data at a message-level to help refine their strategies and messaging. The Twitter Post Performance report pulls every Tweet from a reporting period into a single stream, making it easy to compare message performance. Tweets can also be sorted by likes, Retweets, engagement rate, impression, clicks or whatever metric matters to you most.
Sprout’s Twitter reports automatically pull the top three Tweets by engagement into the dashboard, but it can also be useful to look into posts that are underperforming. What similarities and differences can you spot between top posts and posts that missed the mark? What kind of content types are driving engagement? Is your audience clicking your links? With the answers all in one place, social media marketers get a more holistic vision of their Twitter performance and ideas of how they might pivot their social strategy if necessary.
Discover and monitor trends with advanced analytics
Gone are the days of the cumbersome, basic Twitter search. Sprout’s Twitter Keyword report, available in Professional and Advanced plans, uncovers trends in Twitter traffic for any keyword, hashtag, or complex search query across any date range. Brands can use it to:
- Keep tabs on your market by tracking your brand against your competitors.
- Track effectiveness of your past and current hashtag or marketing campaigns.
- Discover patterns in keyword usage and adjust your marketing efforts accordingly.
- Track your brand’s products against each other or against competitors’ products.
Once you set up your keywords, you’ll get real-time updates when people Tweet the phrases you set, so you can react quickly and engage with potential leads, contribute to trending conversations, get content ideas, and so much more.
If you’re not sure where to get started with keywords, Sprout’s Twitter Trends report shows the topics and hashtags most frequently mentioned with your Twitter handle. The Trends Report also pulls data on the people and brands most frequently talking about your brand. This is a great way to find influencers and brand advocates.
Build a custom report
Compiling data shouldn’t hinder you from capitalizing on it. Sprout’s reports eliminate time-consuming manual processes in favor of automated, exportable, presentation-ready reports.
With the Report Builder, brands can quickly build Twitter reports using Sprout’s existing data, analytics and reporting modules. Simply create and export a custom report built to showcase the social metrics and insights most important to you and your clients.
Publishing & Engagement
Twitter dashboards are more than just analytics. With Sprout, brands can easily plan and publish content to support their Twitter campaigns and strategy.
Plan your Tweets with ease
The native Twitter app is perfect for people that just want to Tweet on-the-go. But businesses need the ability to schedule Tweets ahead of time and put together a complete social media editorial calendar. For that, you need a Twitter dashboard.
You can–and should–Tweet in real-time as well. But when you’re trying to send every Tweet manually, you’ll likely end up with long spans of time where you’re not Tweeting anything because you’re busy or just forget. Stay prepared by using your dashboard to schedule Tweets ahead of time and create a consistent stream of content.
Sprout users can also leave notes within the calendar to indicate important dates, campaigns or other content considerations.
Communicate with your followers
By the end of 2020, customer experience is projected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. To make sure your customers are getting the best experience possible, engage them in conversation. If they ask questions, answer them.
When Sprout users set up their Twitter dashboard, conversations, direct messages, Retweets and more are pulled into a single stream, making it easy to build relationships and respond to your audience quickly.
Responsive, timely customer care does wonders to keep users happy. In a report by Microsoft of global consumers, 96% of those surveyed say that customer service is an important factor in which brands they feel loyalty to. Twitter is one of the first social media platforms people turn to communicate both frustrations and satisfaction, so it’s essential to stay on top of those conversations.
Work as a team
Some companies have multiple people managing their social media accounts. A Twitter dashboard makes team collaboration possible because, rather than having to log into the same Twitter account, they can just log into a shared environment in the Sprout app.
The Sprout Smart Inbox tracks each team member’s activity, whether they’re publishing Tweets, responding to customer questions or completing a task. This helps keep everyone on the same page and ensures team-wide accountability.
Since Twitter’s native timeline moves so quickly, it can be difficult to keep up with all your brand Mentions. Plus, one teammate may not have the context for a conversation another teammate initiated. With Sprout’s Twitter dashboard, you can see the conversation history of the people you’ve communicated within the past. That way if someone has Tweeted a complaint or compliment multiple times, your team doesn’t have to start from scratch. Plus you can get to know more about your fans and give your Tweets and responses a personal touch.
Can I just use the Twitter Dashboard?
The native Twitter Dashboard has some nice features for users who want to dip their toe in the shallow end of analytics. Sprout has more robust features that help social media professionals maximize the effectiveness of their overall Twitter strategy.
For instance, Sprout comes with ViralPost, an algorithm that picks the best time to Tweet based on when your audience is most likely to engage. Twitter Dashboard lets you schedule Tweets, but you’ll have to use your best judgment for when to send them.
Twitter Dashboard gives you some analytics, but Sprout’s dashboard provides advanced, in-depth reporting options that give a more holistic view of your efforts.
It’s more than likely that Twitter isn’t the only platform your brand is on. With Sprout’s dashboard, you can also manage Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn in one place.
If you haven’t taken advantage of a Sprout 30-day free trial yet, start one today. Once you do, we’d love to hear from you. What features would you like to see included in our next launch? Sound off in the comments below or Tweet your feedback @SproutSocial.