I’m a social media consultant. I need to have a handle on the latest social media updates, whether it be for my 9 to 5, or weekly social media podcast with Alt Marketing School.

This post will walk you through how I do it, I’ll cover:

My first dashboard

This was a work in progress for a long time. To begin with, I threw together a simple database including columns for the headline, date, platform, summary, and url.

This made it easy for me to pull in articles about the latest social media updates, either saving directly from my phone or by using the Notion Web Clipper tool in Chrome - more on that later.

I started with a simple database in table view like this:

This was how it all began, a simple database pulling in the headline and link, where I’d then add the platform tag and a written summary of the article.

This was a great start. It was fairly quick and easy to pull in data, and meant that during a podcast recording I could quickly go through the summary - I write these as and when I read the full articles. It helps me pick out what I think is important and worth sharing later on.

I also created a Gallery view of this data, which (bearing in mind this was before Notion’s recent grouping feature), made it quite nice to view during recording as I could quickly see which platforms had a lot of updates I needed to go through.

A collaborative dashboard

To build on my first attempt, I wanted to build a dashboard that could be collaborative, and give my summary column a bit more purpose.

I wanted Fab (co-host of the Alt Marketing School podcast) to be able to pull in the social media news stories she’d found throughout the week too, and for both of us to see what we were doing to avoid any overlap/duplication of content during recording.

Enter, Becca and Fab’s Social Media Dashboard:

This is the database view of our Social Media Dashboard, with new and improved columns, including What happened and Why does this matter to help ensure our notes were specific.

New properties

This dashboard has a few new properties to make it work. We have an Added By heading, Tag heading, a What happened? heading, and finally Why does this matter? heading.

Added By

This is a quick and easy way to help identify which one of us has added news stories to the dashboard. We go through and check to see if we’ve added the same stories before recording to avoid any duplication.

Tag

Occasionally, we don’t manage to get through all the social media news we want to in each in recording, so have this Tag selection to ‘Spotlight’ any news that would fall outside of the date range (which we set to include the last week), but that we want to talk about. Once we’re finished with that news we just remove the tag.

What happened?

This helps us be more specific when we’re going through social media news on the podcast. This is a summary of what’s happened. E.g. Twitter has just launched Twitter Spaces.

Why does this matter?

Once we’ve stated what’s happened, we want to tell our audience why it matters! The audience of Alt Marketing School is generally made up of freelancers, marketers, and creators, so we always keep this in mind when we’re considering new social media updates, and how they will impact these audience groups.

Finding the news

When it comes to searching for social media news, we all have our favourite sources - one of mine is from Social Media Today. Andrew Hutchinson is the Content and Social Media Manager there and I’d highly recommend checking out his articles if you’re looking for regular updates.

So the only question is, how was I collecting news articles I wanted to cover in the podcast recording?

Browser extensions to make my life easier

Simon from Better Creating made this video where he mentioned this new Notion extension. It’s called Save to Notion, and it’s like the default Notion Web Clipper extension but on steroids. You can add more context to pages you’re saving to Notion, whether that be in your Second Brain, or a dashboard like this one.

Here’s the Save to Notion web clipper in action. You can set up separate forms for all your databases in Notion.

This has come in so helpful because now I can add the Platform tag when I’m reading the articles, and my notes too. Rather than having to come back to Notion later and doing admin when I’ve already imported the content.

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Using board view during recording

When we’re recording the show, we switch to Board View so that we can see this week’s news.

I’ve set up a filter to only show the last week of news, to make sure we’re viewing the most up-to-date news, and we use Notion’s recent new group feature (which I love) to make sure that only the social media platforms with news in are shown. This is what the Platform tag helps us achieve. I turn the colours on too, just for decoration.

This is what we see when we’re recording, all of the current week’s social media news available in a handy dashboard we have open during recording.

Get your own social media template

Now you know how I organise any social media news that I come across which I want to save for later and talk about on the podcast. It’s a great system that could easily be adapted to your niche.

Download your own social media dashboard now

How I use my social media dashboard every week