A look at how to use the WordPress dashboard as a social media dashboard to check stats, measure engagement, monitor your blog, and engage using social media tools.

1. Turing WP Into a Social
Media Dashboard
By Kevin Palmer
socialmediaanswers.com
@kevinpalmer

2. Who?
• Bloggers trying to be more efficient
• Small/Medium sized businesses
• Beginners trying to figure out what content
works

3. Why?
• One stop shop
• You can’t ignore the data
• Forces you to participate

4. What?
• Stay on top of Analytics data
• Understand engagement with your blog
• Monitor mentions of your blog/brand
• Interact using other platforms

5. Data
• Google Analytics Dashboard Plugin
• Basic Google Analytics data
• Easy to digest
• Drills down to Post/Page

7. Stats Per Post
• Appears on Post/Page Edit Screen
• Visually represent what content is working
• Tie Post Rank in to really paint a picture

8. Engagement
• Post Rank Plugin
• Checks engagement across social media for
your blog/brand’s content
• Overall and on a per post level

10. Engagement Per Post
• Appears on Page Edit Screen
• Shows what content is working socially
• Client can understand what is working via
search and what is working socially

12. Monitoring
• Edit dashboard via functions panel
• Create your own feed widgets for client
• Combine feeds together or create feeds
based on different social media monitoring

13. What to monitor?
• Google Alerts
• Blog Pulse
• Twitter Search/Twingly Search
• Social Mention
• Board Reader

14. New Widget
• Examine the code in the trac:
• http://core.trac.wordpress.org/browser/
trunk//wp-admin/includes/dashboard.php

15. Edit Existing Feed

16. Twitter Status Updates
• By putting Twitter functionality in WP
combined with monitoring gets clients to
participate frequently
• Don’t have to sign in anywhere else or use
an application

17. Multiple Options
• I prefer the Twitter Tools WP Plugin
• Tweet right from dashboard sidebar
• Gives the user additional functionality
(create a digest of tweets into a post)

18. Facebook Information
• Facebook Dashboard Widget Plugin
• Allows user to pay attention to Facebook
status feeds of friends and items posted
• Really just configured RSS feeds into
widgets

19. In Closing
• Give yourself or your client a better
overview
• Make it easy to monitor and engage
• Gives them a base layer of knowledge
before introducing them to complex tools

20. Thank You
• My Blog: SocialMediaAnswers.com
• Twitter: @kevinpalmer
• E-mail: Kevin@SocialMediaAnswers.com