Over the last several years, social media has become an integral part of both business and marketing. When using social media for your small business, the most important thing to remember is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. The internet never sleeps, so how can you manage your social sites effectively without being online 24/7?

If you’re an avid social media marketer, you’ve probably heard of a social media dashboard before; Hootsuite is a popular choice used by many. A dashboard keeps all of your business accounts in one convenient place. This type of online tool will effectively assist you in making social media management a simple process rather than an overwhelming one.

Productivity – By having everything gathered together, your business will be able to organize and manage your daily social media activities all in one place, which will increase your productivity. A dashboard will save you time, thus eliminating the need to manually go into each account and check what happened in the past week.

Scheduling – Only a few social networks allow you to schedule your content, and it’s a headache to open each account and schedule every post manually. Plus, no one likes being bombarded with a string of posts within a given span of time, so scheduling on a dashboard is a smarter way to be present without really being there.

Analytics – Dashboards make it easy to analyze everything at once. You will find that a dashboard helps stop the guesswork. Analytics allow you to see what your audience clicked on, so you may fine-tune your posts according to what your followers enjoy. Tracking performance data is the best way to identify which tactics are working and which aren’t. A few things to watch are growth, engagement and sharing. Most social media networks have tools you can use to track and measure your performance.

Do you use a dashboard to manage social media for your business? If so, do you find it to be helpful?