1. Authenticity is king right? Well… no.

Lots of blogs keep telling us how you need authenticity to drive engagement and followers, but this isn’t always the case. There are platforms out there that provide social media analytics and automated workflows with proved results. Our friends over at GoodAudience have published multiple studies that show 3x more engagement using their auto following, auto-favoriting rules then trying to careful select and engage with content on your own.

2. You must monitor all your social media analytics in realtime.

Of course it’s useful to know if someone important has just mentioned your brand – but you can do that by just logging onto your social account. For most social media analytics and marketing activities “real time” is just a distraction. Any post (even that one from Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars) takes time to build momentum. Nothing goes viral immediately. Most useful insights and social media analytics take time to build up before the patterns become visible. So the quest for “real time” data is often just a distraction, an obsession of a generation who wants everything faster just because they can.

3. Your social media analytics dashboard vendor needs to provide training.

If you need to be trained on how to use it, forget it. Simple and intuitive should be the key principles of any dashboard. Reports and data should enlighten you, not push you further into the dark. If your current data and reports require a statistician to interpret them then perhaps you have slept too long and awoken in a strange and scary place. Close your eyes and go back to sleep.

4. Your Dashboard needs to inlcude analytics on SEO, PPC and anything covered by Google Analytics.

Why? Nothing beats Google, so why waste your time. It’s called comparative advantage, some people are good at some things and others are good at other things. No need to create some behemoth platform. After all you can remember log in details to more than one platform right?….. right?

5. You need to use a social media analytics or management tool that incorporates emails, marketing, content, publishing, analytics, coffee and your haircut.

There are tools out there that are very good in one specific area or very reasonable across a couple. Don’t try to find a non-existent holy grail that takes care of your whole workflow process and life. That tool does not exist, how could they possibly be better than Hootsuite for scheduling and Buffer for publishing and Google for Analytics!

6. Your social media dashboard needs to include multiple sources, including:  Tumblr, Pinterest, WordPress, Dribble, Tinder and anything under the sun.

 

Unless you are in a very niche market and generating leads from snapchat, you should just focus on Facebook, Twitter and maybe LinkedIn or Instagram. Save your time and money for something that can actually generate you a return and use social media analytics to inform, guide and grow your brand.

 

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