We all know the expression “the customer is always right.” Our customers asked for more flexible media monitoring. We didn’t offer enough choice. They wanted to be able to do things their way.
And guess what? They were right.
To make monitoring easy and efficient, you need to customize how you view your data. Your business isn’t the same as the next. Your needs are your own.
So now, we let you build your own dashboards with only the data you want.
Create custom graphs to measure what you care about, and add them to dashboards that track specific goals. You can start with a template and make tweaks, or build it from scratch.
The result is made-to-order media monitoring that fits you just right.
How do they help me?
Aside from giving you more freedom and more control, custom dashboards have three major advantages:
Focus on what matters to you
Monitoring tools come with ready-built dashboards to help you make sense of your data. That’s great!
But typically, there are a handful of graphs that really interest you, and the rest you just ignore. That’s not ideal.
And it’s worse for agencies. You don’t want to show a client how well they’re doing on Facebook, but have to tell them to “just skip those two graphs – they’re not important.”
Now that’s not an issue. Build dashboards with only the metrics that you – and your clients – really care about.
Create specific dashboards for specific goals
Sometimes, it’s best to keep your data separate. Mention lets you monitor the web, social media, blogs, forums, and the news. And within those sources, you can track sentiment, reach, volume – you name it!
It makes sense that you’d want to keep some of this information separate. You may have entirely different teams working on building your social media following, versus tracking news reports around the world.
It’s now incredibly simple to do this. Just build different dashboards depending on who needs them, and what they’re tracking.
Build dashboards for different clients and stakeholders
Your Mention account is meant to be shared. You can grant guest access to anyone you like – clients, colleagues, or your boss. But not all of these people know how to use the tool, and they have no idea what they’re looking at.
Since you know what you’re doing, why not show them how clever you are? Make custom dashboards for each user containing strictly the information that matters to them. You save them time, and you have more control over the dashboard.
Win, win.
So how do I set them up?
Imagine you’re a well-known burger chain, and you want to compare your brand against three of your competitors.
Of course, you can already do this with the Competitive Analysis dashboard. But maybe you want to include a few of your own graphs and change the layout from the basic template.
Easy.
1. From the “Dashboards” tab, select “Create Dashboard.”
If you want to start from scratch, choose a blank template. If you’d prefer to tweak our existing graphs, choose from one of our templates.
2. Give your new dashboard an award-winning name:
3. Now it’s time to create your graphs. First, select the alerts you want to monitor. You might only be interested in your own brand, but we’re focusing on competitors, remember?
4. Next, choose the metric you want to measure. In this case, we’ll start with reach – the potential audience size of all mentions combined. In other words, how many people might have seen social posts, news, and blogs about each company.
The metrics you can track include sentiment, languages, locations and influence of users, reach, and topics. And we’re constantly adding to this list.
5. Choose how you want to display your metrics. We’ll go for a pie or “donut” graph – the most delicious option available:
You might also use a bar chart, line graph, stacked area, stacked bar chart, or one of many other options.
6. Finally, choose any filters you want to apply. This includes the time period, source of mentions, languages, tags, and sentiment.
7. Now just repeat steps 3-6 until you have all your favorite graphs in one handy place. And don’t forget to save!
Feeling curious? Just click!
See, we told you it was easy. But what we didn’t tell you is that these graphs are also interactive.
To see the raw mentions behind your graph, just click on the section you want to examine.
You can do this on any pie chart to examine individual segments, or on any graph that only features one alert. (In other words, we can’t combine the feeds for two or more alerts, because that would get confusing).
Give it a try
If you have the Insights Center, you can access Custom Dashboards.
If you have a Mention account but don’t have the Insights Center, talk to your account manager. They’ll help you set it up.
And if you’re not using Mention at all, just request a demo. We’ll help you set up the perfect media monitoring account, exactly how you want it.
